In Athens stasis hurts, while elsewhere DB1 keeping ISE, Ken Griffin explains the real Bond market dynamics, Tulletts buy oil broker, HKEx to slash ‘through train’ fees and much much more, happy scrolling:
Public Markets
Hellenic Exchanges Athens SE Q2 2015 Results
Reuters
vs Q2 2014 – Consolidated net profit at 5.4 million euros, down 60%, turnover at 18.5 million euros, down 31%.Full results here.
PLY: The good folks of Hellenic Exchange do not deserve the bumbling political fools who have ended up doing so much economic damage to a fine institution. I am confident they can bounce back albeit not so sure the Greek nation can do the same thing now their idiot Prime Minister has jumped from the madness of Marx to total debt servitude which beggars the nation.
Meanwhile Athex have been busy clearing SIBEX, albeit at 1208 contracts in 22 days (June 29-July 28) it is fair to say they have hardly been overly taxed…
Greek Bourse To Reopen Wednesday Or Thursday After ECB Approval
Reuters
Greece gained the ECB’s approval to reopen its stock market with no restrictions for foreign investors but with limitations for local ones.
PLY: A whole (sad) new meaning to the ‘manana’ approach to Mediterranean corporate governance. albeit being manipulated from Brussels/Frankfurt…
Hellenic Capital Market Commission: Short Selling Extension
MondoVisione
PLY: To clarify, you can’t sell short the instruments which anyway you pretty much cannot trade because the market is closed. #ILoveTheBlob.
TOCOM Consolidated Financial Statements For Year Ended March 31, 2015
MondoVisione
Total revenues 2 729 mln Yen (USD 22 mln), down 4.4%; Net income 42 mln Yen (USD 340k), compared to (913) mln Yen.
DB1 CEO Currently Has No Plans To Sell ISE
Reuters
PLY: This will surprise many onlookers. How else will DB1 remove those stretch marks from its balance sheet?
Tullett Prebon Acquires MOAB Oil
Automated Trader
Tullett Prebon has acquired MOAB Oil an independent broker of physical and financial instruments in the energy markets. MOAB was incorporated in 2003. The business has 23 brokers and is based in Norwalk, Connecticut. MOAB generated revenue of $23.7m (£14.4m) in 2014.
The acquisition is being funded from existing cash resources and comprises an initial cash consideration of US$12.3m (£7.8m), plus an amount equal to the working capital in the business, including cash & payments over 5 years.
Read our Premium Exchange Deals Brief.
PLY: Interesting, has new Tullett CEO John Phizackerley been reading the Jeff Sprecher playbook and decided to replicate the early strategy to some extent?
HKEx To Slash Stock Connect Fees
Reuters
HKEx plans to slash the fees it charges for trading mainland China shares via Stock Connect, starting from next month, subject to approval from regulators.
Read our Premium HKEx – SSE – Stock Connect Brief Part 3.
Overlooking The Other Sources Of Liquidity (subscription)
Ken Griffin – Wall Street Journal
Banks have promoted a myth to preserve a competitive moat around what has been a very lucrative business.
PLY: That ongoing meme applied by those masters of Stockholm syndrome, the bankers, is deftly unwrapped by this most elegant missive from Ken Griffin. The truth is the bond markets have been stymied by the banks for years. Now it is time to set them free, and in the process further reduce the ridiculous stranglehold the sell side maintains on actually developing markets to benefit all, not just a narrow coterie of investment banks.
Banks Fail To Persuade Regulators To Dilute New Buffer Rules
Huw Jones – Reuters
Rules will soon be finalised forcing the world’s top banks to hold enough liquid assets to cover between 16 and 20% of their liabilities, after industry lobbying failed to persuade regulators to relax the plan.
The Financial Stability Board (FSB) coordinates financial regulation for the Group of 20 economies and will finalise the rules by the end of September for endorsement by G20 leaders in November.
PLY: With P2P/marketplace lending exploding in popularity and the big banks still (like national governments) perilously close to insolvency in many cases, there is no reason to indulge banks, unless we all have a deep-seated desire to live in Hippy Communes in the Catskills or Cotswolds knitting our own sweaters and using cans of beans as currency. For once a regulator stands up sensibly to the banker blob.
PRNewswire
ICE SVP Edmonds To Testify On Five-Year Anniversary Of Dodd-Frank
ICE
PLY: Watch these testimonies for challenges to the limits of political diplomacy. Alas even with something so egregiously awful as the Dodd Frank we ended up with (as opposed to the crisp notion of clearing up OTC markets and reducing too big to fail banks), actually pointing out that the whole thing is a disaster, tends to be frowned upon in political circles. #TBT
Nairobi Bourse Lobbies Treasury, CMA To Cut Shares Transaction Levy
Jackson Okoth – Standard Media
Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) is holding discussions with National Treasury and Capital Markets Authority (CMA) with a view to lowering the 0.3% transaction levy, introduced during this year’s budget.
MOEX: Tick Size Change On The Equity & Bond Market From 03 August
MondoVisione
Private Markets
Private Trading Venue For Smaller Stocks Finances A Comeback (subscription)
Sarah Krouse – Wall Street Journal
A “dark pool” stock-trading venue backed by Credit Suisse is planning a comeback following a fresh investment from a former bond-industry executive. AX Trading Group is planning to go live in September with a dark pool for block—or large-scale—stock trades in small and midsize companies, nearly 2 1/2 years after closing because of low trading volumes.
Former NY Financial Watchdog Counters Criticism On Bitcoin Work
Karen Freifeld – Reuters
Former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, Benjamin Lawsky, countered criticism from the bitcoin community that he may have generated consulting work for himself by issuing controversial regulations for virtual currency firms before he left his post.
PLY: The tragedy of the Lawsky legacy is, regardless of whether or not his low latency leap from government to private practice fundamentally benefitted his own interests, is how the rest of the world must now be engaged to preclude them introducing regulation as desperately analogue as even the revised Lawsky proposals which demonstrated how economic illiteracy can be found so close to Wall Street in geographic terms.
Special Section: FTI, NSEL, India at the Crossroads
PLY: MCX & FTIL flat as the courts mull some matters:
High Court Passes Decree Against Ark Imports, Says NSEL
Indian Express
NSEL on Tuesday said the Bombay High Court has passed a decree against Ark Imports Pvt Ltd, one of the top defaulters, for selling off its property to recover dues of Rs 719.37 crore (USD 112.5 mln).
PLY: The need for auctions is acute as the second anniversary of this farago looms large without a clear resolution plan.
Delhi, Mumbai Cops Engaged In Turf War Over NSEL Scam
Indian Express
NSEL has been accused of collaborating with 25 ‘fictitious’ firms on the forward trading market to trade fake stocks on the exchange on the basis of forged documents.
Read our Premium NSEL Scandal Brief – Part 16.
PLY: The ludicrous nature of these turf wars merely encourages debate that India is fundamentally not fit as a jurisdiction for exchanges. That is a harsh conclusion but, in reality, unless and until, the Indian blob gets to grips with its fundamental judicial issues, Houston we have a problem. India must become more than merely a bubbling mass of opportunity but a tangible, functional nation which wants to do business with investors.
Technology
Johannesburg SE Selects MillenniumIT Trading Solution
LSE
JSE extends use of Millennium Exchange trading platform and Millennium Surveillance beyond equities into derivatives and fixed income markets. Technology underpinned by Millennium Advanced Platform (MAP).
PLY: Not so much an achievement, more a relief for Millennium methinks? It’s a logical expansion to add fixed income and derivatives to the existing equity platform leased by JSE. However the recent sale of clearing technology to JSE by Cinnober clearly rattled the Sri Lankan arm of LSE Group. Presumably this deal will be better hedged by JSE than the original LSE cash market tech deal dating back to 2001…
Products
New Bond Trading Platforms Not A ‘Big Bang’ On Wall Street
Sarah Krouse – Wall Street Journal
A host of new electronic fixed-income trading platforms have cropped up in recent years, aiming to connect buyers and sellers in a liquidity-challenged corporate-bond market. But new research from Greenwich Associates suggests that adoption and use of the new platforms has been spotty thus far.
PLY: Er, presumably this is intended to be the start of a series as anybody with more than the IQ of a chewy candy could spot the lack of electronic platform adoption in bond markets. Nobody in their right mind expected a ‘big bang,’ apart from various platform owners in this space, who, admittedly are somewhat delusional about how far/fast the market will move imho.
Bondcube Failure Reveals Pricing Flaw In $8 Trillion Bond Market
Matthew Leising & John Detrixhe – Bloomberg
The collapse of fixed-income trading platform Bondcube after only three months highlighted an obstacle to creating new trading venues in the $8 trillion market: a lack of prices to foster liquidity.
Read our Premium The Bond Bubble, On Bonds & SEFs, A Bond Market Dilemma, The Bond Platforms Rush Brief – Part 1, Part 2.
PLY: Actually it’s summer time therefore the bond hacks are desperate to write anything, so we get somewhat strained interpretations such as this. Bondcube CEO Paul Reynolds is wise not to comment here. Note that the billionaire Ken Griffin has neatly exploded the arguments outlined a few articles above this one, so I don’t need to bother…. What will kill the new wave of bond platforms is HUBRIS – and frankly pretty much every new entrant possesses that in spades, which allied with a refusal to accept that the bond market bubble is ending/over will mean a lot of platform failures (including some names who ought to have known better). The revolution will be challenged throughout by the banks playing a defensive plan akin to the Russians in the siege of Stalingrad.
Investors Boost Clearing Of Credit Swaps (subscription)
Joe Rennison – Financial Times
So far this year, investors have placed $5bn of old and new single name credit default swap trades on US companies into a clearing house, surpassing the $4.4bn seen during 2014, according to ICE.
ICAP
MondoVisione
CME’s New Treasury Futures Contract To Fill ‘”Term Gap”
Alice Attwood – FOW
NZX Listing Of New Global Smartshares ETFs
MondoVisione
EEX To Develop Coal, Freight (subscription)
Alice Attwood – FOW
Indexes
FTSE Russell Launches New Ex Coal Index Series
MondoVisione
KRX Publishes KOSDAQ 150 Index, A New Benchmark Index Of KOSDAQ Market
MondoVisione
Career Paths
Linear Investments has opened its first European office, in Hamburg, providing Linear’s growing European customer base with local support. Linear has appointed Norman Hartmann as group CTO and to head up the European office.
Financial Calendar
This week
29.07.2015
SGX full-year results FY2015
BGC Partners’ and GFI Group’s Q2 2015 Financial Results
Thomson Reuters Q2 2015 Financial Results
CFTC’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee – agenda here
30.07.2015
WSE H1 2015 Financial Results
CME Q2 2015 Financial Results
SunGard Data Systems Q2 Financial Results
CBOE Q2 2015 Financial Results – 31.07.2015
New announcement
NZX H1 2015 Financial Results – Wednesday, August 19
All forthcoming exchange / investment related events are now listed in our Events page.
Other stories
WFE: Global Equity Trading Volumes Rise 36% In 1st Half 2015 Driven By China
MondoVisione
PLY: Does anybody have that worrying feeling of peak volume on the basis that since the end of H1 China has de facto nationalised their stock market. Just saying…
Sebi Cracks The Whip On Speculation
Praveen Chakravarty, V. Anantha Nageswaran & Ajit Ranade – Livemint
Trading in derivatives far outstrips that in equities and is largely speculative. Sebi is taking steps to check this.
PLY: SEBI again notes how it believes capitalism is the embodiment of evil.
IOSCO Publishes Country Review Of Pakistan’s Implementation Of IOSCO Principles
MondoVisione
Nigerian Capital Market – Legal & Regulatory Review / Recommendations
MondoVisione
A major strategic move towards the much expected reforms of Nigeria’s capital market will be effected soon, with the launching of the “Nigerian Capital Market: Legal and Regulatory Review and Recommendations,” the first white paper on the reform agenda by the Emerging Capital Markets Taskforce (ECMT).