237 Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast March 23rd, 2024
Transcript:
This week in the parish of bourses and market structure:
Amidst Typhoon Warnings, There's A Sino St. Petersburg Pivot And More Funding For Abaxx,
As Johannesburg Starts To Cloud Hop,
While The Big Sale Of The Week Is Bourse Dubai Trimming Their NASDAQ Stake.
My name is Patrick L Young
Welcome to the Bourse Business Weekly Digest
It's the Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast Episode 237
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, this is a very brief reduction of highlights amongst the key headlines from the week in market structure. All the analysis of the many events and happenings from the past 7 days can be found in Exchange Invest Daily subscriber newsletter, the unique guide to the bourse business sent daily to your inbox.
More details at ExchangeInvest.com
Plaudits to the ICE House podcast on marking 400 episodes recently and this week, they have a phenomenal guest, self-made billionaire investment titan, Ken Griffin, who made a magnificent case for Miami / South Florida as a financial center and the ongoing wonder of America as a whole, and I quote:
“One of the great parts of the US capital markets is its vibrancy. And you see that in daily turnover continuing to be strong and you see it in the continued breadth of market participants in the US equity market. And we need to make sure that we are well positioned to continuously provide competitive prices to manage risk until our capital markets to function at their highest possible ability”
Those are the words of billionaire investor Ken Griffin, I'm only giving you a glimpse of the show, it really deserves a listen in its entirety as Episode 406 of the Inside The ICE House podcast. Ken Griffin In Boca: The Evangelist For Making The Migration To Wall Street South is a must listen.
Over in Boca, it was great to similarly hear the Exchange leaders promoting US markets...
Adena Friedman presciently pointed out how “money flows continue to be global, even if politics are becoming more local. So from our perspective, as a technology partner to global exchanges and regional exchanges, domestic exchanges, they want to get themselves to a point where they can attract as much capital as possible.”
On the question of “Geopolitics…the new world order and how that ships decision making…” Jeff Sprecher illuminated the panel session with some fascinating insights. Again, in his own words:
“It's interesting because we, my company, and many of my colleagues, our peers who are here: We build global businesses. We built our technical businesses in the era where the internet could take you across borders, and the regulators around the world accommodated that. And we're kind of deglobalizing now,” interesting words of from Jeff Sprecher, the Founder and Chairman CEO of ICE
All of the information about those panels was in our Exchange Invest daily newsletter, of course.
Meanwhile, moving on to Bitcarnage, perhaps the fastest crypto move of the week was a real-time court T+1 judgment - faster than a Bitcoin blockchain - albeit with the full judgment to come in a few weeks time…
After 6 weeks in court, Mr. Justice Mellor ruled that the evidence was “overwhelming” that Craig Wright was not Satoshi the Bitcoin inventor. Ahead of his ‘fairly lengthy’ ruling in the summary, he noted: “I will make certain declarations which I am satisfied are useful and are necessary to do justice between the parties. First, that Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin White Paper. Second, Dr. Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period 2008 to2011. Third, Dr. Wright is not the person who created the Bitcoin system. And fourth, he is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin software.”
Market of the week was in SBF’s sentencing - a wide 6.5 - 50 is the current range between the defense and prosecution respectively.
At the same time as SBF, raise the question : “Am I a depraved super villain?”
Elsewhere a memo emerged of a proposed SBF MAGA journey, which was so outrageous, it is hilarious. An exasperated Jeff John Roberts at Fortune writes “Every time you think Sam Bankman-Fried can't possibly get more despicable, he proves you wrong. The latest example comes in the form of a secret memo he wrote to himself following the collapse of his fraudulent crypto empire.” That is an article headlined: Sam Bankman-Fried’s Secret Tucker Carlson Plan Is Cynical But Not Surprising.
Not only was SBF about to dump his lefty leanings of “effective altruism” and go full MAGA via Tucker Carlson. Gosh, come to think of it, maybe he could have done a threeway interview with Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, in what may be the greatest moment in crypto philanthropy - or not just another day where a crypto bro tries to gamify the justice system - CZ has announced outline information on his next big project…the weeks before his sentencing hearing ‘Giggle Academy’ is going to offer free basic education for all from Grade 1-12 (-ish), he claims.
While busy gamifying education, of course, CZ has not at any moment given any thought to gamifying the justice system by appearing cute and cuddly just before his sentencing hearing. At the same time, CZ (or his consulting representatives) look very slick whereas SBF with this Tucker Carlson pivot thesis looks like, at best a dweeb. Anyway, some might call it a “4:FUD!” others may even say a spot of education is better from CZ than none at all for the underprivileged.
Finally, Bakkt swapped out their CEO for another board members as they desperately tried to stay listed on NYSE and secure sufficient funding to survive.
If you enjoyed this excerpt you may be interested to know that you can read Bitcarnage every day in Exchange Invest. Alternatively, if you want follow Bitcarnage the daily update and happenings in the world of crypto and digital assets you can find Bitcarnage as a standalone on Substack
Exchange Invest Bitcarnage
In the major exchange news of the week, first up, Hong Kong Exchange is scaling back their plans for opening the stock market and typhoons but nonetheless, progress to open the Hong Kong market during extreme weather is being made, even if it doesn't include the strongest of typhoons.
Meanwhile, LCH is joining CME and ICE in looking towards throwing their hat into the ring to clear US Treasuries, while the London Metals Exchange is proposing new warehouses for metals, specifically Copper and Zinc in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
On T+1 news EFAMA (that's the European Fund Managers Association) is not worried about US stocks trading and settling T+1 per se, it's the inability of the Forex utility CLS to actually clear cash forex which concerns some, understandably.
Don't forget, you can still catch my T+1 article in this month’s Vermiculus newsletter which is available at Vermiculus.se.
From Frankfurt news emerges that DB1 is building a dark pool for equities. Very interesting news as DB1 of course had a partnership with Liquidnet years ago, which the buy side got very upset about, and DB1 dumped with a low latency spineless shuffle. Nowadays, both DB1 and Euronext are eager to have their own blog platforms...Alas, Liquidnet never quite made the best of their first mover advantage for many reasons.
In Russia, SPIMEX the St. Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange makes a Sino- pivot from St. Petersburg with US stock trading, having been cha llenged by sanctions on Russia,now the exchange is moving to offer Chinese shares on its platform.
In new markets this week, the Ethiopian Securities Exchange edges closer to the launch pad with Ethier telecom being rumored as the first offering but there's no mention of that hyper-optimistic unicorn valuation of a billion dollars.
In Zimbabwe, the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange will launch a mineral commodities exchange in conjunction with DGCX Dubai.
And indeed there was a cornucopia of new market announcements this week. More can be find of course in Exchange Invest daily, the exchange of information.
Deals news, again a busy week for deals in the parish, all the deals were in Exchange Invest daily, the newsletter no person can afford to be without in capital markets and market structure. For the sake of this podcast let's look at some edited highlights.
Two stories this week, a Blackrock based commodities exchange startup Abaxx have raised yet more cash.
They've been on a semi-perma feat of money raising for quite some time. The latest began as a Canadian dollar 9.9 million round and it appears to have morphed all at a roughly 10% discount to the stock price to something approaching 16 million Canadian dollars by the time we were recording this podcast. We've mentioned before how Abaxx we're close to the final preparations in recent weeks in this podcast and also of course in Exchange Invest. They also raised $27 million at the start of this year, as reported in EI 2855 on January 5th. And their first strategic financing investor was announced in EI 2737 on August 16th 2023 while in EI 2200, we reported about their $50 million brokered private placement spin out of their Base Carbon Corp.
Nontheless Abaxx was not the biggest deal of the week, that fell to a partial stake sale as Bourse Dubai sold down $1.6 billion of NASDAQ stock. That means Bourse Dubai are no longer the largest shareholder in NASDAQ. They fallen from 15.5% to a still very significant 10.8% that still gives them the opportunity to nominate members of the board. However, Thoma Bravo now become the largest single shareholder in the NASDAQ exchange with a 12.5% stake.
If you're trying to work out how technology is affecting life and markets, don't forget to check out my most recent book “Victory or Death?” Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and the FinTech World. That's published by DV Books and “Victory or Death?” is distributed by Ingram worldwide.
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While you're waiting for your copy of “Victory or Death?” to arrive, check out our live stream Tuesdays 5 o'clock London time, and 1 o'clock New York time it's the IPO Video live show. Catch the back episodes on Linkedin and Youtube via IPO-Vid.
Our most recent show was an epic and wonderfully happy affair. We were speaking to Professor Gunnar Stefansson in Iceland, all about Smileycoin - The Happy Face Of Crypto.
We're gonna have a further very exciting and positive discussion coming next week. IPO-Vid #137: Modernizing Markets: Magnus Haglind. He's the boss of Marketplace Technology sales for the NASDAQ group and that's going to be coming out usual time, usual place, of course live on YouTube or LinkedIn and X (Twitter).
You can get some Magnus Haglind show Modernizing Markets IPO-Vid 137 that's gonna come out at 1 o'clock Eastern this week due to slight curvature of the earth issues which is going to be 5 o'clock London time.
Meanwhile, our “Finance Book of the Week” is Niall Ferguson's classic The Ascent of Money, bringing Niall Ferguson's signature clarity and expert lens to bear on appreciating that while many may resent the plutocrats of Wall Street, the evolution of finance has rivalled the importance of any technological innovation and the rise of civilization. So to study the ascent and descent of money is to study the rise and fall of Western power itself.
Our next “Book the Week” by the way, will be unveiled on Saturday in the EI Weekend edition - we don't charge for that. That's our macro special and actually coming up this weekend, we have an epic it's a Haiti crisis Special Edition. You can get that edition and all future weekend editions by hopping over to ExchangeInvest.com and clicking the subscription button for the free weekend newsletter.
Don't forget while you're at it, you could also avail yourself of a free 30 day trial all about the bourse business sent daily to your inbox by subscribing to Exchange Invest via ExchangeInvest.com. It's only $375 per annum to join the exchange of information.
There was lots of product news this week, I'm not gonna go into the details there were particularly our heap of index launches, indices and index futures aplenty - all of that news was an Exchange Invest daily, the Bulletin of the bourse business.
However, in technology, we had a couple of epic stories.
First of all, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and Amazon Web Services are collaborating to evolve the technology, enables, and transform capital markets.
Quite a shift for both AWS and JSE. It's a very interesting move for the Johannesburg Stock Exchange group as it would appear their entire tech stack could be replaced along the way into the cloud. It's sensible in every level, including the appallingly erratic concept of South African infrastructure in the modern age (alas). Thus the cloud makes a lot of sense. What next for LSEG tech given that some say the first JSE knew that LSEG had stopped selling technology systems was when they read about it in Exchange Invest.
One other piece of good news this week Aquis Technologies has secured a contract with the Central Bank of Colombia. Good news for the London based exchange in technology group.
In regulation, the US CFTC’s Behnam is saying that he's writing a new policy on prediction markets. Absolutely overdue cannot come soon enough as far as I can see, prediction markets need to be enabled and the CFTC needs to get its act together under Chairman Behnam, some sort of act of redemption compared to his crypto disasters, including of course his cheerleading for SBF and FTX in the past.
Meanwhile, the UK regulator the Prudential Regulatory Authority has migrated its rules to a single site of ‘truth’ - hooray! You can find a PRA Rulebook site via the FCA.
Career path this week, Troy Kane, a director at Citadel Securities, is leaving his role for a position exchange operator Miami International Holdings (MIAX).
Alexandre Kech has become the new CEO of the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF).
And Forbes Global has appointed capital markets veteran Larry Leibowitz, the brother of comedian John Stewart, to its board of directors.
Finally, this week in career paths, let's say a hearty word of congratulations to the laureates inducted into the FIA Hall of Fame last week. I was particularly delighted to see former LIFFE Chairman (and master of Worshipful Company of World Traders), Jack Wigglesworth being nominated for the FIA Hall of Fame alongside Marquette co-founders Jim Heinz and Rob Moore amongst the nominees. Other recipients included CBOT Chairman Charles Carey, who of course has served as Deputy Chairman of the CME for a long time, the former CME CRO Timothy Doar, former CFTC staffer and now Capitol Counsel GC De’Ana Dow and likewise it was great to see John Lothian recognized for his newsletter of the futures markets, alongside Nick Forgan, John Munro, Leslie Sutphen, Pat White and posthumously William Maller’s Sr.
Alas were gonna end the trigger warning today, the following may cause alarm from the ecological angle.
China last year accounted for no less than 96% of global coal power capacity construction with domestic coal production heading a record of 4.66 billion metric tons (+2.9% year on year) according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
…And on that mysterious and magnificent note thank you for listening to this Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast # 237.
Join us daily via ExchangeInvest.com or if you have any exchange you'd like built get in touch.
My name is Patrick L Young and I wish you a great week in life and markets.
LINKS:
Episode 406: Ken Griffin In Boca: The Evangelist For Making The Migration To Wall Street South
Inside The ICE House
HK Weighs Scaling Back Plan To Open Stock Market In Typhoons
Yahoo Finance
LCH Looking At Clearing US Treasuries, Competition Set To Increase
Yahoo Finance
LME Proposes New Warehouse Location In Jeddah
LME
LME Plans To List Saudi Port As A Copper And Zinc Delivery Point
Reuters
Dark Horse: Deutsche Börse Building Dark Pool
WatersTechnology
Blackrock-Backed Commodities Exchange Startup Abaxx Raises Cash
Bloomberg
Aquis Technologies Secures Contract With The Central Bank Of Colombia
Aquis
U.S. CFTC's Behnam Says Agency Writing New Policy On Prediction Markets
Yahoo Finance
Kane To Leave Citadel Securities For Senior MIAX Role
Risk
Alexandre Kech To Become New CEO Of Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation
GLEIF
Forge Global Appoints Capital Markets Veteran Larry Leibowitz To Its Board Of Directors
PR Newswire
Member discussion