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Virtu Financial has acquired the Designated Market Maker (DMM) business for the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and NYSE Amex. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
“This acquisition is consistent with Virtu’s primary business objective of providing highly efficient, fully obligated, customised liquidity to investors across all markets,” says Vincent Viola, Chairman and CEO of Virtu Financial, LLC. “We are excited about playing an important part of the NYSE and NYSE Amex marketplace. We look forward to working with our listed company partners and providing our unique liquidity to their valued investors.”
As a result of the close
Lombard Odier Investment Managers (LOIM) has appointed Jan Straatman (pictured) as Chief Investment Officer, a newly-created position, effective 1 March 2012. He joins from ING Investment Management where for the last two years he was Global CIO, overseeing EUR330 billion of client assets.
Straatman will be based in London, reporting to Hubert Keller, who is a Managing Partner of Lombard Odier and co-responsible for LOIM along with Thierry Lombard.
With 28 years of investment experience, Straatman joined ING’s European asset management unit as CIO in 2008 before becoming global CIO for that business. While there, he oversaw 800 investment professionals
Walkers have completed the first redomiciliation of a Jersey investment fund into Ireland. The fund, BlueAlpha Global Equity Fund plc (BlueAlpha), successfully migrated and has been authorised in Ireland as a UCITS fund. Apex Fund Services (Ireland) Limited is BlueAlpha’s new administrator, with BNP Paribas Securities Services Dublin Branch acting as custodian.
Sean Peche, Director of BlueAlpha says: “Walkers’ presence in both Jersey and Ireland meant they were uniquely positioned to assist us in the continuation. The process was extremely well managed and we couldn’t have achieved the end result without Walkers’ high level of competence and professional service.”
The
The London Stock Exchange Group has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the 50 per cent stake in FTSE International Limited, from Pearson, that it does not already own. Following the transaction which is expected to close in Q1 2012 subject to customary closing conditions, FTSE International Limited will be wholly owned by the London Stock Exchange Group.
FTSE currently calculates and manages over 200,000 indices worldwide which are linked to over USD3 trillion in global Assets under Management. These include the widely used global benchmark, the FTSE All-World Index, as well as a range of flagship indices around the world, such
Interview with Mike Rosen, senior managing director, Concept Capital Markets – The outsourcing of middle- and back-office services as well as increased demand for better technology in areas such as portfolio analytics, performance measurement and risk management are key trends that Concept Capital Markets is continuing to focus on.
As the firm’s senior managing director, Mike Rosen, explains: “These are the things we’ve been focusing on as a company in an effort to help our clientele meet the needs of the investing community, in particular institutional allocators.”
Post-trade analytics is one area the firm has been enhancing throughout 2011. The
By James Williams – Two of the more obvious trends that have occurred in prime brokerage post-Lehman’s are perhaps, unsurprisingly, intrinsically linked to counterparty risk. The first is the move away from mono-prime to multi-prime mandates. The second, more recent trend, is the growth in prime custody solutions, accelerated in part by the likes of HSBC and JP Morgan, both colossal global custodians, entering the prime brokerage arena.
Both trends are rooted in a common objective: to minimise counterparty risk. The fact that MF Global imploded last month, amidst allegations that client accounts were being used intraday for its own
Interview with Chris Barrow – The tumultuous events of the eurozone debt crisis, which sent the markets into a tail spin this summer, have caused a lot of headaches for investment professionals. But for HSBC’s Prime Services offering, which launched around the time of Lehman’s imploding, this year’s volatility has actually been playing right into its hands.
This has, in large part, been down to investors and managers alike scrutinising the strength of prime brokers’ balance sheets, and more importantly, determining whether their assets are being held somewhere safe.
“We launched Prime Services in response to client demand really. Hedge
By James Williams – For the prime brokers on whom hedge fund managers rely so much on, there’s not been a huge amount to shout about in 2011. Trading volumes are down and leverage is stuck at modest levels of 2.1x to 2.4x (compared to 4x leverage prior to 2008), despite record-low financing costs. It’s fair to say that 2011 hasn’t exactly been a halcyon year for prime brokers.
“Less leverage means lower balances, which drive prime brokerage revenues,” says Glen Dailey, Managing Director and Head of Prime Brokerage at Jefferies.
This is a business where margin levels are tested
The Honourable Jed S Rakoff of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has entered a consent judgment against Zvi Goffer in SEC v Galleon Management, LP, et al., 09-CV-8811, an insider trading case the SEC filed on 16 October, 2009.
The SEC charged Goffer, who was a registered representative and a proprietary trader at the broker-dealer Schottenfeld Group, LLC during the relevant time period, with using inside information to trade ahead of impending acquisitions.
In its action, the SEC alleged that, on July 2, 2007, Goffer was tipped with material non-public information that Hilton Hotels
After the turbulence, trauma and topsy-turvy markets that investors have endured in 2011, it is no wonder that we are all tiredly gazing towards 2012 with some trepidation, says Thomas Beckett, CIO of PSigma Investment Management…
Events over the last few weeks have once again encapsulated the perilous and punishing world that we now live in; question marks have once again appeared over both the future of the Eurozone and the sustainability of the economic recovery the world has enjoyed since the depths of the Great Recession that ended in 2009. Despite the cracks that have appeared in the global
