Larry Tabb, founder and CEO of market-structure consultancy Tabb
Group, has joined Bloomberg, according to his LinkedIn profile. He
closed the 17-year old capital markets research and consulting firm,
as the firm was badly hit by the isolation measures enforced by
companies and government authorities to contain the spread of the
Coronavirus pandemic.
The closure of TABB Group, in March 2020, was announced in an official
statement: “Dramatic and profound changes in the research business
have challenged the firm for the past several years. Now exacerbated
by the Coronavirus, this public health condition has eliminated Tabb’s
ability to produce industry events and conferences—a major source of
its revenue. These forces have made it impossible for TABB Group to
deliver its high-quality research and services to its valued clients
while compensating its staff appropriately. The company has amassed
tremendous data, analytics, and a vibrant professional community on
TabbFORUM, and will now look to sell its assets.”
On Twitter, Larry Tabb said at the time the company’s board “just
pulled the plug”. “We will be shutting down as of today and putting
assets up for sale. I want to thank everyone that has supported the
company, our folks, and me personally over the past 17 years.”
The firm’s most recent research said the sell-side was in a tight race
for the equity algo business. The claim of a “survival of the fittest”
mode argued that the sell-side’s artificial intelligence (AI) equity
algorithm ecosystem has expanded after years of development work to a
point where significant AI-attributable excess returns have finally
begun to be realized in the past two years. Automated performance
measurement applications like algo wheels are driving broker selection
decisions, competition to build better, faster, smarter algorithms has
become a war of attrition. 41% of sell-side firms interviewed launched
their client-based AI algos only last year.
In his latest tweet, Tabb said: “I am starting my first day at
Bloomberg today @business. I will be heading up a new team to do
market structure research. My content will be on the Terminal and will
find out soon how much I can share through other sources. Very happy
to be part of the Bloomberg team.”
During his 17 years running the TABB Group business, Larry Tabb
published industry research analyzing both US and European market
structure; central clearing, credit default swaps, fixed income,
equity and foreign exchange trading; financial markets trading and
processing systems; analytical trading tools; financial markets
infrastructure, including grid and cloud computing; and foreign and
emerging market technologies.
At Bloomberg LP, he will work full-time as Head of Market Structure
Research, Bloomberg Intelligence.
