Todays Newsletter
The Math Prodigy Whose Hack Upended DeFi Won’t Give Back His Millions
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Alexandria Perry has given her notice and tomorrow is her last day at JLN. She has accepted a new position and starts Monday. We thank her for her contributions to JLN, especially her work on The Spread. Alex...

John Lothian Newsletter
We visit more than 100 websites daily for financial news (Would YOU do that?)
John Lothian Newsletter
Robinhood’s Era of Fun and Games Comes to an End
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff I have made plane reservations on British Airways to fly to London for IDX and I have a reservation at the Montcalm at The Brewery for the week, so yes, I am going to IDX in June. How about you? Note to my FIA...
Crop Trading Giant ADM Sees Years of Tight Markets Fueled by War
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Matt Chamberlain has decided to stay on as CEO of the LME, Reuters reported. He had previously announced he was leaving to join a cryptocurrency firm, but that was before the nickel crisis. That is a strong move...
ICE’s Clearinghouse Had $1 Billion Margin Breach Last Year
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Happy birthday to the Cboe today as they started trading on April 26, 1973. The history of this momentous day has been memorialized in a 20-page paper by Cboe Co-founder Joseph Sullivan, the Cboe's first...
Retail investors drive sharp rise in share trading before Wall Street’s opening bell
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff This is not a "good news Monday." The unprovoked Russian war against Ukraine and the World War II-esque destruction of Mariupol just became a lot more personal for many of us in the futures industry with what...
Crypto Billionaire Rankles Wall Street Titans With Derivatives Plan
First Read Institutional Trading, Options Growth Among Q1 2022 Trends, say FIA Webinar Participants Sarah Rudolph - John Lothian News The trend for the first quarter of 2022 is a revival of institutional trading - along with continued rapid growth in the options...
Hunger and Blackouts Are Just the Start of an Emerging Economy Crisis
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff David Solomon and Goldman Sachs want to help FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, especially with their issues with the CFTC, the FT reported. This is very nice of Goldman, and timely, as a couple of publications have...
Wannabe Traders Chase Dream of Student-Loan Payoffs Via Market Wins
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff When I was a college reporter with the Purdue Exponent, my one and only assignment that took me on the road was to South Bend, Indiana, home of Touchdown Jesus and the Fighting Irish football team. But I went to...
SEC Uncovers $194 Million Penny Stock Schemes that Spanned Three Continents
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff A judge in Florida says we don't have to wear masks on planes anymore, and Mickey Mouse is now back to hugging people at Disney. The judge, according to Rolling Stone Magazine, the arbiter of all things legal,...
Gary Gensler Reflects on His First Year as S.E.C. Chair
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff There is a bit of deflation running through the NFT market, particularly with the NFT of Jack Dorsey's first tweet dropping from $2.9 million to just under $14,000, according to a WSJ story. There is a bid for...
Trades fail in US corporate bonds as banks avoid Russia links
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Caroline Pham has been sworn in as a commissioner of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which means all the new commissioners have been sworn in and we can now officially wish Dawn Stump well in her...
City of London Firms Are ‘Desperate to Hire’ in Tight Job Market
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff Later this morning JLN will publish the FIA Boca 2022 interview Alexandria Perry conducted with Cboe's Catherine Clay. Cboe has made several investments in Clay's neck of the Cboe's woods since Boca last met and...
Russian Tech Industry Faces ‘Brain Drain’ as Workers Flee
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff I grew up using a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica my father bought as a resource for countless school papers. Today, rather than a shelf full of alphabetically aligned, beautifully bound look alike books,...
DTCC Building Industry’s First Prototype To Support Digital U.S. Currency In The Clearing & Settlement Process As Part Of Digital Dollar Project Effort
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff William Knottenbelt, CME Group senior managing director, head of international, will retire at year's end, the exchange group announced today in a press release, burying the lede, as organizations so often do....
LME chief calls for scrutiny of private deals in nickel probes
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff A top economic advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is demanding that four major commodity trading companies stop handling Russian oil. Oleg Ustenko was quoted in an FT story saying, "They are in...
A Market Mystery: The ‘Wheat Whale’ That Came Out of Nowhere
First Read Hits & Takes John Lothian & JLN Staff We are still rolling out videos from Boca, but the FIA is already promoting IDX. The FIA International Derivatives Expo is returning to The Brewery on Chiswell Street in London from June 6 - 8 for an in-person...