Search results for

Investors are now content with the quality of secondary bond markets in Europe. They can transact large sizes on tight bid-offer spreads without moving prices against themselves. But is this just a bull market phenomenon?

Electronic trading

back to White shoe seeks blue blood

It's not yet clear exactly how the JPMorgan Casenove joint venture will be branded, but we hear that the two organizations are not planning to adopt an animal to spearhead their cause. They could be making a strategic error. Barclays Capital markets its Barx trading platform with a variety of dog mascots, from terriers to Jack Russells. And it has long been trendy to show that you are hawkish, bullish or bearish with the creature you use to front your operation. After all, Merrill Lynch is famed for its bull, Caja Madrid has its bear and there are scores of organizations from Bank Boston to Baring Asset Management that sport birds of prey in logos.

Foreign exchange

India Citigroup and General Electric pioneered the use of India's potential for providing cheap services to their global operations years before outsourcing became popular. But if their recent moves are any indication they have divergent views on the way they want to manage their businesses in the future.

back to What price global warming?

European mezzanine finance is growing fast in absolute terms and as a proportion of the financing of individual deals. With hedge funds and CDO structurers eager for the paper there's a fear among some traditional mezzanine investors that pricing is not taking proper account of risk and that innovative structures are an unhealthy development for the market.

Will Cazenove's blue-blood culture and exclusive corporate clientele be under threat in its joint venture with JPMorgan? Rivals would like to think so but the two parties are aware of how crucial these features are. What's more, there's nowhere much else for top corporate customers to go. The biggest danger is that the merged firm will cater for so many blue chips in such sectors as mining that conflicts of interest might emerge.

Banks are trying, with mixed success so far, to interest institutional investors in structured products based on funds of hedge funds and hedge fund indices. For institutions that have been slow to obtain approval for alternative investments, structured products offer a quick fix. But suspicion abounds.

back to Call in the six sigma altruists