Technology, Capital Markets, Corporate Governance, Leadership, Entrepreneurship
Category: Investment Banks
Robinhood and other Fintech firms are using Social Media-based principles and tools such as "gamification" software to drive customer growth and usage. Legacy Asset Managers are taking the M&A route. Order Flow Revenue or "Pay-to-Play Revenue" is the revenue that Asset Managers generate from directing equity and options order flow to various trade execution firms … Continue reading Two Different Approaches To Growth: Fintech vs. Legacy Asset Managers
IBM plans to spin off the Managed Infrastructure Services business within its Global Tech Services ("GTS") segment (approximately $19B TTM revenue through June 2020). Doing so will provide more air time to the acquired RedHat OpenShift (IBM's "Hybrid Cloud" strategy) and cognitive computing businesses. Post-spin, the growth in these businesses will make a greater revenue … Continue reading New IBM CEO Arvind Krishna Understands the Value of Spin-Offs
Innovation is the name of the game and I am unable to think of a major bank that has innovated or disrupted the market over the past 20-30 years. Goldman probably comes closest. Goldman's biggest "innovation" was attaching itself to Apple's coat tails. JPMorgan has leveraged AI and other advanced technologies internally. However, JPM has … Continue reading Most Banking CEOs Fail To Innovate. New Citi CEO Jane Fraser May Have Better Luck.
High Frequency Trading ("HFT") operations have purchased order flow in order to trade in front of it for years. The fact that Robinhood didn't properly disclose its practice is missing the larger issue. This practice provides HFT operations with an enormous advantage. HFT's powerful machines glimpse order flow and execute proprietary orders that benefit from … Continue reading High Frequency Trading Operations Have Traded Ahead of Order Flow For Years. The Practice Stinks.
Large Financial Institutions should acquire FinTech companies. Doing so would enable FI's to diversify beyond the depositary services business which will continue to suffer in a prolonged low interest rate environment. We won't lay out the entire FinTech ecosystem, but here are several examples. Capital Markets: FactSet (tkr: FDS) and SS&C Technologies (tkr: SSNC). FactSet … Continue reading Banks Should Acquire FinTech Companies
Intercontinental Exchange (ticker: ICE) recently announced that it agreed to acquire Ellie Mae from Thoma Bravo for approximately $11 billion. It makes sense that a large FinTech company is working to drive automation across the mortgage processing landscape. Ellie Mae will nicely augment Intercontinental's 2018 acquisition of MERSCORP. MERSCORP operates the MERS System, a national … Continue reading The Mortgage Processing Market Is A Riddle Best Solved by FinTech Companies
High Yield bond issuance has benefited greatly from the near zero interest rate environment. The Federal Reserve has played an increasingly larger role in the capital markets since 2009 with its extreme low interest rate and expansionary monetary policies. Q2'20 High Yield bond issuance of $125.4 billion was up 88% sequentially from $66.7 billion in … Continue reading The Quixotic Pursuit of Yield
Ever "carb-load"? I used to. "Carb-loading" is the process of consuming large quantities of carbohydrates which are stored as glycogen and subsequently burned while competing in an athletic event. Doing so made me feel sluggish. Do you know who else feels sluggish? Software companies that Private Equity owners have loaded with debt. It's difficult to … Continue reading Debt-Loading Is Killing Innovation
This next round of debt-funded stimulus will ensure that the U.S. economy look much like Japan's at least for the next decade if not the next 20-30 years. The fiscal side of the ledger is a deficit-promoting mess and the monetary side is complicit by way of subsidizing the debt. Fed official Neel Kashkari believes … Continue reading More Debt-Funded “Stimulus” Ensures Near Zero Real GDP Growth
The pundits chat up gold and silver in the midst of economic uncertainty and trade tensions with China. They are forgetting the Fed's record money printing party. Investors who were concerned about the recent rapid, large scale expansion of the money supply (particularly M1) have had positions in gold and/or silver since early April of … Continue reading Worth Its Weight In Gold?
