The big news out of Expo overnight was the victory by Money.net in the Innovators Award. FIA made a great move by encouraging the innovators pavilion last year and it has already showcased some excellent new entities – e.g. Duco and GMEX were two from last year’s take-up which spring to mind. In awarding the jury prize to Money.net the FIA at once has shown a sensible link to its grass roots – FCMs and their clients, as well as recognising a bottleneck in an era of wafer thin commissions where as John Damgard once put it of exchanges themselves “the status quo won’t do.” There have been various challengers to the backbone of Bloomberg/Reuters’ terminals but Money.net pushes the right organisational and AI buttons to inaugurate a new age.
This is a prescient moment for reflection as the big two are now fundamentally at risk – 2500 USD per terminal / year flattens the landscape of market access (and BTW highlights market data costs, that’s a story for another day…). Like all good predatory transformations, Money.net can eat the heart out of the comfortable pantry of Bloomberg or the deliciously dated but always surviving Reuters. It’s war in the terminal market. The Capital Market Revolution reaches another fascinating stage. Amidst many great business models in the Innovators Pavilion, he judges have chosen wisely.
Elsewhere at the BBA conference in London, the ECB’s Andreas Dombret warned of government intervention in central banks: “Politicians are well advised not to exert influence in the wrong place or with the wrong measures” he intoned. What prescient words – politicians must feel threatened that screwing up the economy is now the prerogative of the central bankers who clearly relish their newfound, if utterly abused, power. There was an acute localism to the remark too as the British government fired a shot across the bows of the perma-wrong Bank of England governor Mark Carney recently. I love Canada but share a belief with many that the serially on the wrong side of the argument, Mark Carney has distinctly overstayed his UK welcome as head of the Bank.
Or as The Spectator has remarked pithily this week:
“As Mr Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, says to his daughter Mary, who is playing the piano badly: “You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.” It is time for Mr Carney to shut the piano and go home.”
In Today’s Exchange Invest
Money.net may not be the new plastic but it will have a massive impact. Elsewhere the future of Europe’s most innovative equity options market, TOM, is open to question.
All this and more in what is worth a scroll as always…
Events
Soon: Burgenstock is back, slightly later than usual due to Swift invading Geneva in September. Time to Claim your discount code via Exchange Invest: (see banner on left- and use this discount code “YOUNG15” to get 15% off the delegate fee).
The Stuttgart SE 10th Anniversary MIFID Conference also advertised to your left looks most interesting and I am delighted to be chairing a session there November 17th.
In BigWorld
Larry Sanders, brother of Bernie placed 4th in the Witney by-election to replace retiring MP David Cameron who, you may remember, once ran the UK in a chillaxed fashion. Green party candidate Larry was 9 votes ahead of the imploding UKIP with 1363 votes or 3.54% of the total…albeit some way the clear winner for Cameron’s Conservative party (unsurprising in the Tory heartlands of Oxfordshire).
Public Markets
LDB1-LSE Probe To Be Extended by 2 Weeks
FT
PLY: Interesting – said to be examining possible remedies…as I mentioned yesterday hopefully the EU antitrust folks have not biodegraded into monkeys so unless it’s a deal without LCH.Clearnet in its entirety for starters, they won’t be voting for the merger of equal desperation and a horribly monopolistic European securities domain which will be bad for markets.
Solid Quarterly Earnings At LSE
Reuters UK
PLY: Excellent numbers all round and from LCH in particular, they must have acquired some good quality steam to power the legacy IT systems.
Brazil Delays Tax Judgment On 2008 BM&FBOVESPA Merger
Reuters
PLY: 2008 merger is with a tax appeal concerning alleged improper goodwill to generate tax credits. Hearing suspended as one panellists asked for time to review evidence.
Zero Wedge: Shrinking Margins & Increased Regulation Leaves ‘Restrained Optimism’ For Gold
Platts (blog)
PLY: Interesting review of LBMA conference in Singapore.
When it comes to London gold trading, I always think of the author Douglas Adams discussing Earth and unhappiness in the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy: “Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
A Nasdaq Speed Upgrade Is Threatening IEX
Wall Street Journal
The time it takes for trades executed at U.S. exchanges such as IEX to be published on Nasdaq’s consolidated feed of stock prices will shrink Monday…
PLY: Not so much a SIP as a series of speedy glugs in the offing. However, it is interesting to see how the media now uses IEX as the reference point for stock execution stories – marketing catnip to Brad and his team but doubtless a tad frustrating for those incumbents who actually have not done such a bad job for anywhere up to a few centuries…
Sprecher Hopes Brexit To Prompt Mifid Review
FOW magazine
PLY: ‘Round here I am at the ‘pick a deity, any deity and pray’ stage that we can combat the idiocies of so many regs and particularly the great waste of time predicated as MIFID II. Anyway here is FOW’s take on Jeff’s remarks at the FIA Expo where he politely but viscerally savaged the waste of time, space and effort which is MIFID II, as previously mentioned yesterday.
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