To Russia With Love-Access To Exchanges Opening

russia with love brokerdealer access

(Bloomberg) Algorithmic and high-frequency traders in the U.S. may soon get even greater access to Russian markets via Russia-based brokerdealer BCS Financial Group.

BCS Financial Group, one of Russia’s biggest brokerdealers, agreed in October to purchase a New York-based unit of AO Alfa Bank. It expects regulatory approval by the end of 2015. Should that happen, BCS aims to use the acquired business to give American automated trading firms and other clients increased access to the Moscow Exchange.

Through its London office, BCS already works with 10 algorithmic traders “with American roots,” including one of the biggest, Virtu Financial Inc., according to Roman Lokhov, the head of global markets at BCS. The company aims to increase the number of U.S. clients to 50 to 70 in the next two years as it expands into high-frequency trading and other businesses, he said during an interview in Moscow.

“We can give them infrastructure and high-speed access to Moscow Exchange — I mean micro- and nanoseconds,” Lokhov said.

Regulatory Scrutiny

Anybody who takes BCS up on its offer may face increased scrutiny from the Bank of Russia, which said in September that it’s monitoring high-speed traders to ensure they’re not manipulating the market. Algorithmic firms now account for more than half the stock trading volume at the Moscow Exchange.

Many high-frequency traders are market makers, meaning they provide liquidity for other firms that want to trade. That strategy works best during times of volatile prices, and Russia offers just that; the ruble has sunk 20 percent versus the dollar in the past six months, making it one of the most volatile currencies in emerging markets, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

International investors have withdrawn from Russia in the past year as sanctions over Ukraine and the decline in oil prices hobbled the economy. While the price volatility coupled with a reduction in geopolitical risk have lured foreign speculators back to the market recently, BCS is not seeing a renewed interest in the country’s assets from institutional funds with a longer-term outlook, according to Lokhov. Capital outflows from Russia may reach $70 billion this year, according to central bank estimates, following record withdrawals of more than $150 billion in 2014.

For the full story via TradersMagazine, please click here

 

Boutique BrokerDealer Launches Intl Equities Surge

mischler financial

Boutique Investment Bank Mischler Financial Launches International Equities Surge

Veteran-owned Firm Bolsters Ranks With 4-Member Team Hire

 

(GlobeNewsWire) Newport Beach, CA, December 9—Mischler Financial Group (“MFG”), the financial industry’s oldest boutique investment bank and institutional brokerage owned and operated by service-disabled veterans announced the firm has recently hired a 4-member team of financial industry veterans who specialize in international equities trading and portfolio solutions.  The new traders will operate from Mischler’s Boston trading desk and lead the firm’s 24- hour, agency-only execution in Asian, European, Latin American and Canadian equities for institutional clients.

The new hires include Managing Director Lawrence Peruzzi, a 20-year global trading market veteran whose International Equities experience includes ten years of buy-side trading desk leadership on behalf of Standish Mellon and The Boston Company Asset Management. During the past eight years, Mr. Peruzzi was Managing Director of International Trading for sell-side broker-dealer Cabrera Capital Markets LLC. Mr. Peruzzi is joined by the following newly-appointed Vice President(s); Timothy Casey, a 25-year industry veteran whose pedigree includes senior roles for both “buy-side” firms and most recently served as the senior U.S equities sales-trader for Cabrera Capital Markets LLC; European Equities specialist Patrick Morrissey, a 20-year veteran having buy-side and sell-side experience at Cabrera Capital Markets LLC, Jones Trading and The Boston Company Asset Management; and Asian Equities specialist Jeanne Austin, one of Wall Street’s most respected women traders who has led trading desks for Susquehanna International Group, KCG Holdings and Citigroup during her 30 year career.

dean chamberlain

Mischler Financial Group CEO

Noted Mischler CEO Dean Chamberlain, “As we look back on our 20th anniversary of operations and look forward to continuing our mission, our new Boston-based unit will enable us to cast an even wider footprint across the secondary market equities trading space and further complement a long-established platform that embraces a holistic approach to true best execution of equity block orders and 10b-18 programs.” Added Chamberlain, “When compared to the Industry’s top execution desks, we’ve earned a reputation for punching above our weight class and exceeding expectations. Our new team members will augment our well-proven best execution capabilities; each individual has a deep understanding of best ways to navigate global equities markets while meeting the needs of the most demanding buy-side traders and investment managers.”

About Mischler Financial Group

Established in 1994, MFG is certified minority broker-dealer regulated by FINRA and federally-certified Service-Disabled Veteran Business Enterprise (SDVBE) headquartered in Newport Beach CA with regional offices in Stamford CT, Boston MA, Chicago, IL and Detroit MI. Mischler Financial Group serves leading institutional investment managers, corporate treasurers, public plan sponsors and select hedge funds by providing capital markets services, agency-only execution and portfolio solutions within the global equities, fixed income and alternative investment markets. MFG also provides new issue underwriting, domestic syndication and proprietary capital market insight. The firm’s website is located at http://www.mischlerfinancial.com

For Additional Information:
Dean Chamberlain, Chief Executive Officer
Tel. 203.276.6646

 

Did JPMorgan Commit Fraud To Silence Whistle-Blower?

jpmorgan whistleblower

Behemoth brokerdealer and six pack bank JPMorgan has had its share of blow backs consequent to pushing envelopes, but recent story via NY Times profiling former broker Johnny Burris comes straight out of the “Tell-Me-This-Really-Isn’t-True Dept”–and causing at least several former federal prosecutors to ponder whether JPMorgan could be charged with various counts of wire fraud, aside from libel charges, in an obvious attempt by mid-level bank executives to silence a whistle-blower.

Here’s the simple summary-according to NYT reporting, JPMorgan knowingly submitted phony customer complaints to industry regulator Finra in an effort to malign the integrity and reputation of broker Johnny Burris in an effort to discredit his whistle-blowing charges that JPMorgan pressured brokers to sell house products that were either not suited for certain clients, or were products that were considerably more expensive than those clients could have purchased from other providers.

Courtesy of extract from 4 December front page business section of NYT and reporting by Nathaniel Popper….

Johnny Burris, a former broker at JPMorgan Chase, might have known he was walking into a minefield when he decided to go public with his concerns about his former employer.

Mr. Burris complained in 2013 that JPMorgan was pressuring brokers like him to sell the bank’s own mutual funds even when the offerings from competitors were more suitable. A few weeks after an article in The New York Times about Mr. Burris’s concerns appeared, complaints from some of his former clients in Arizona began showing up on his disciplinary records that are maintained by a regulatory agency and publicly available.

The client complaints made it hard for Mr. Burris to get another job and helped scuttle his case against JPMorgan for wrongful termination. But when Mr. Burris recently reached two of the clients whose names had been on the complaints, they told him they had not, in fact, written the complaints — a JPMorgan employee had.

Carolyn Scott, the ostensible author of one of the letters complaining about Mr. Burris, said in a recent interview with The Times that she had not written the document, but had signed it without knowing the contents after a JPMorgan employee had told her it was something that could help her “get some money back.”

“I was stupid enough I didn’t read it myself,” Ms. Scott said. “I had no problems with Johnny. No problems whatsoever.”

Another man who supposedly wrote a letter of complaint was, it turned out, essentially unable to read or write, and said in an interview that he had never had an issue with Mr. Burris.

BrokerDealer.com investigators located Mr. Burris’s record of phony complaints via Finra BrokerCheck

“I would never have known how to draft a complaint letter, nor could I have drafted the letter in question,” the man said in a declaration that he recently signed in front of a notary public to support Mr. Burris — after the declaration was read back to him aloud.

For Mr. Burris, the explanation behind these complaints was clear: This was retaliation for his criticism of JPMorgan, though retaliation carried out poorly.

“How do you believe I feel knowing that the bank solicited, drafted false, erroneous complaints about me?” he wrote to JPMorgan in late October, after speaking with his old clients.

During the arbitration in 2014, Mr. Burris’s lawyer asked his former supervisors if anyone at JPMorgan had helped draft the complaints and was told: “Absolutely not.”

This week, though, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan, Patricia Wexler, said that one of Mr. Burris’s former colleagues, Laya Gavin, had, in fact, assisted the clients as a courtesy “by typing up what they told her verbally, reading it back to them for accuracy, and submitting them for review.”

Both clients involved disputed that description of the events and said that the complaints Ms. Gavin wrote up did not reflect their sentiments and added that Ms. Gavin had not read the complaints to them before having them sign the documents.

A spokeswoman for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Michelle Ong, said that her organization was “aware of these allegations” about the complaints and was looking into them. Finra is the agency that maintains broker disciplinary records.

Keep reading the NYT story by Nate Popper via this link

TD Ameritrade is Moving-From NYSE to NASDAQ

td ameritrade

(Bloomberg) – TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. will move its share listing to the Nasdaq Stock Market from the New York Stock Exchange.

The online brokerdealer expects to begin trading on Nasdaq Inc.’s stock exchange on Dec. 14 under its ticker symbol, AMTD, the company said in a release Tuesday.

“We regularly review our many business relationships, and moving our shares to Nasdaq is the right thing for our business at this point in time,” Fred Tomczyk, outgoing chief executive officer of TD Ameritrade, said in a statement. Kim Hillyer, a spokeswoman for TD Ameritrade, declined to elaborate on what led to the decision to move the shares from Intercontinental Exchange Inc.-owned NYSE to Nasdaq.

BrokerDealer.com maintains the global financial industry’s most comprehensive database of broker-dealers operating in more than 30 countries worldwide

The listing change comes as Tomczyk announced he will retire on Sept. 30. He will be succeeded by Tim Hockey, head of Canadian banking and wealth management at Toronto-Dominion Bank, which owns about 40 percent of TD Ameritrade, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Before taking over Tomczyk’s role, Hockey will become President of TD Ameritrade on Jan. 2, the company said.

 

Brazil’s Top Investment Banker Busted; BTG Pactual Chief in Bribe Probe

andre esteves

Andre Esteves, Brazil’s top billionaire investment banker and until this past Sunday, Chairman and CEO of brokerdealer Grupo BTG Pactual SA, submitted his resignation this weekend after being busted last week by federal prosecutors for purported bribery charges.

47 year old Esteves  is not only Brazil’s top investment banker, he is one of the top ‘cool kids’ across the global investment banking industry. Esteves, who many have likened to being Brazil’s version of Lloyd Blankfein, is also the controlling shareholder of Brazil’s equivalent of Goldman Sachs. The finance industry star delivered his resignation from a Sao Paulo jail cell, where he is being held without bail consequent to his arrest on purported bribery charges relating to a probe of Petrobas aka Petróleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil’s largest state-controlled energy company. Though expected to have been released this weekend, the Supreme Court of Brazil ruled to make the arrest “preventative”—which in layman terms means that Esteves will be cooling his Gucci-covered heels for an indefinite period.

Prosecutors suspect the billionaire dealmaker, along with a senior senator, tried to obstruct a long-running graft probe involving Petrobras. Esteves, through his lawyer, has denied the allegations. Shares and bonds in Latin America’s largest independent investment bank were bashed further on Monday, reflecting concerns about the impact of the investigation on operations after the Supreme Court extended the financier’s detention indefinitely.

It was the first time the bank, which has long been synonymous with Esteves, has been directly implicated in the bribery scandal. Prosecutor General Rodrigo Janot used evidence and other suspects’ testimony to persuade the country’s Supreme Court to extend Esteves’ detention on a preventive basis.

Documents obtained by Brazil prosecutors purportedly suggest BTG Pactual had paid 45 million reais ($12 million) to Eduardo Cunha, speaker of the lower house of Congress, in exchange for passing legislation favoring the bank, the newspapers said.

BTG Pactual denied making such payments in a statement on Sunday, and pledged to cooperate with authorities. Cunha also denied the allegations.

BTG Pactual named two founding partners, Chief Operating Officer Roberto Saloutti and Chief Financial Officer Marcelo Kalim, as co-CEOs. Persio Arida, who became acting CEO after Esteves’ arrest, is now chairman, with Huw Jenkins, head of the bank’s international arm, becoming vice chairman.

The full article from Reuters is at this link