[lpage]

It's a huge number that only makes context when looking at the absurd scale of capital markets globally. BlackRock has written on the cost of liquidity [1]. Unfortunately, much of the institutional research on this topic is in a walled garden, so we plan on publishing on this when we have our own data. Treating it as a Fermi problem, the market cap of US equities is ~50T and 140T notional of US equities traded in 2021. The global market cap is 125T (I don't have trading volumes there). FICC is much larger than equities.

Portfolio returns compound exponentially, so even small inefficiencies matter big time.

[1] https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/literature/whitepaper/vi...

[rwissmann]

You can get to big numbers on global capital markets, for sure. I was wondering whether you a consulting/VC-style estimate given how specific the statements was: "Smart Markets hold the potential to eliminate that loss" of "at least a trillion dollars annually".

How do you think about it? Let's say we expect half the benefit to come from equities.

>> 0.5T / 125 T = 0.004

>> Smart Markets would need to raise portfolio returns by an average of .4% (net of trading costs) annually.

[mchusma]

Don't know if this is accurate but the entire online stock brokerage industry revenue appears to be about $14B.

That seems like a significantly lower upper bound to the market size here.

That said, what seems interesting here is to come up in advance with many potential arbitrages, and load them in advance for fulfillment if they occur. Risky but interesting than having to roll your own complex tool for this.

https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/on....

[lpage]

To clarify, 1T isn't what we're claiming as our revenue opportunity; it's what traders are missing out on annually in the form of portfolio returns due to market friction and missed Pareto outcomes.

(FWIW and not that it's the market that we're going after per se—our strategy is mostly blue ocean—the market for US equities electronic execution services across the whole stack of technology, market data, broker algos, etc., is $18B/yr.)