UBS Employees Become Members Of NYC “Sexual Elite” Networking Club

UBS

Brokerdealer.com blog update courtesy of DealBreaker’s Bess Levin and for many clients, this story could be a deal breaker. UBS, a Swiss global financial services company with its headquarters in Basel and Zürich, Switzerland, UBS is operating in more than 50 countries with about 60,000 employees around the world, as of 2014. Some of these 60,000 employees have decided to attend a “sex club” in New York City. Below is an extraction from DealBreaker

Have you spent a good deal of time gazing upon your coworkers and thinking, “Working alongside each other is nice. Watching them scarf down Seamless has its perks. Burning the midnight oil to get these pitchbooks done is more fun than you’d think. But what I’d really like to do is attend a sex party with these people. But not just any old sex party put together in a slapdash manner and attended by people who give bondage gear a bad name. I’m talking a highly organized sex party produced by pros who know what they’re doing. Maybe someone with a British accent, who only has a couple degrees of separation from the Queen of England, and can lend an air of class to the event and know how to make a decent cup of Earl Grey. Someone whose roster of clients include the crème de la crème of f*cking. Someone who is not just a sex party planner but a serious businesswoman who did 7-figures in revenue last year by providing “A-list actors, British aristocrats, Formula One owners, moneyed married couples” and banking heirs with a smorgasbord of sexual delicacies”? Then today’s your lucky day.

Leggy models in Christian Louboutin heels and Wolford stockings glide from room to candlelit room. A dapper man in a custom suit eyes them while sipping Champagne by the mansion’s fireplace. A DJ plays in a corner. Oysters are slurped at the bar. And then, in a matter of minutes, pants are off, bras are unhooked and a tangled web of nude revelers go at it on a bed plopped smack in the middle of the 12,000-square-foot home. It’s just another night at Killing Kittens — the roving members-only sex club that professes to be “the world’s network for the sexual elite.” On Saturday night, the kinky London-based club makes its New York debut. For $100 per woman and $250 per couple, the adventurous can spend hours sleeping with strangers in a swanky Flatiron loft rented for the evening. Cocktail attire and masks are required (though, needless to say, both will get shed rather quickly)…

“When [my ex-boyfriend and I] hosted a party at our house [in London], we had a bed and there were these two gorgeous silver foxes and this black girl whose legs went to Tokyo, and she was just demanding everything from them . . . it’s complete carnage,” she says. “It’s like a buffet.” […As of Tuesday, Sayle says 60 people have signed up for the NYC event, including a group of British female bankers who work at UBS’s Midtown office and a bevy of models. “They all have the same mentality,” a raspy-voiced Sayle says of her members.” They’re all overachievers.

For the entire article from DealBreaker, click here.

 

BrokerDealers Eye On The Next Bitcoin IPO: Secretive Firm Backed By Best and Brightest

Bitcoin

Brokerdealer.com blog update profiles the $116 million raised over multiple fundraising rounds by bitcoin starup 21 Inc. While the startup is planning to use the funds to create top secret products that no one knows much about, brokerdealers anticipate the launch of the next bitcoin IPO. The update comes from CoinDesk’s Joon Ian Wong’s 10 March article “Bitcoin Startup 21 Announces $116 Million All-Star Backing

Brokerdealer.com blog has done extensive coverage of the emerging bitcoin market. Just last month a New York City public official proposed accepting bitcoins as a form of payment for fines and fees, while the Winklevoss twins prepare to launch a bitcoin ETF.

Stealth bitcoin startup 21 Inc, formerly 21e6, has announced new information about its funding history, staff members and investors, revealing it has raised $116m in fundraising over multiple rounds.

In a new interview with the Wall Street Journal, 21 CEO Matthew Pauker indicated that Andreessen Horowitz, Data Collective, Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures and Yuan Capital are among the firms that have participated in the company’s funding rounds.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston; eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll; Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi; PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin; and Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus have also invested in the startup.

Perhaps most notable is the involvement of Qualcomm Ventures, the venture capital subsidiary of the global semiconductor company that designs and markets wireless telecommunication products.

Pauker told the news source that 21 aims to leverage Qualcomm’s production capabilities to develop a suite of undisclosed products to be released in the coming months.

Co-founder Balaji Srinivasan, a partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, compared the ambitions of the project to the development of 56-kilobit Internet modems and wireless Internet towers, suggesting a long-term vision that helps bring bitcoin to consumer households.

The figure would top the $106.7m raised by Coinbase to date through its four public funding rounds. 21 raised $5m in venture capital in 2013 as 21e6.

For the entire article from CoinDesk, click here.

BrokerDealer Compensation: Re-Visiting Retention Contracts; Advisor Advisory

retention advisor contracts

BrokerDealer.com blog update profiling the topic of compensation agreements between brokerdealers and respective financial advisors operating under BD umbrellas is courtesy of extract from 10 Mar article in BankInvestmentConsultant.com

With many long-term retention contracts expiring, wirehouses are under pressure to once again ensure the retention of their top producers. Kenton Shirk, associate director at Cerulli Associates, discusses how management is leveraging deferred comp to stem defections.

What are the latest triggers resulting in advisor moves?

A change dictated by B-D leadership may cause advisors to switch firms, especially if advisors feel their net financial benefits have decreased or their employer is rigidly dictating undesirable new policies. Industry recruiters have told Cerulli that continuous changes to comp structures also have left some advisors feeling they need to work harder to earn the same amount of money. Competitors can use this point of frustration to their advantage when recruiting advisors.

Describe the pros and cons when firms overreach, in terms of comp. 

B-Ds need to weigh the strategic benefits of a new comp strategy with the potential impact on advisor satisfaction.

An example is Merrill Lynch’s introduction of relationship pricing in its Merrill One platform in which a client’s fee considers the total financial relationship with both Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. Over the long term, it makes investor relationships stickier since they might be disinclined to follow an advisor to a competing firm since it means giving up discounts across their wealth management and banking accounts.

Yet in the short term, established advisors could potentially feel their parent firm is requiring pricing discounts they might not otherwise offer, creating a sense of frustration.

Will cutting the comp on smaller clients be significant enough to impact retention?

Continue reading

Veronica Vain Has A Deal Brokerdealers Won’t Want To Miss

Veronica Vain

Brokerdealer.com blog update is courtesy of Deal Breaker’s Bess Levin article from 6 March.

You may recognize the name Veronica Vain as the Wall Street intern turned adult entertainment star, which was covered by brokerdealer.com in January, but the former Wall Street intern has another business venture up her sleeve.

Earlier this year, a Lazard Asset Management intern named Paige A. Jennings decided her time on Wall Street had run its course, and she was ready to dive into another industry: adult entertainment. Before she packed up her things, she took a few photos of herself in a Lazard bathroom in varying levels of undress and posted them on the internet, where they gained some attention, as these things tend to do.

Now she goes as Veronica Vain, and while some people in her position might be content to simply play the role of performer (in titles such as “Screwing Wall Street”), Ms. Vain is wearing another hat: Serious Businesswoman. Earlier this week she told Charlie Gasparino she’s got all kinds of plans for monetizing herself and yesterday she took to Twitter to release an open letter to potential partners who’d like to engage with her in an official capacity.

Due to the fact that her Twitter feed is NSFW (not safe for work), Deal Breaker reproduced the letter in their article, and here is an excerpt:

“Are you looking for new avenues of exposure or a new way to get more eyeballs on your product? Are you looking for an innovative way to engage your customers and build stronger brand awareness and loyalty? Have you been thinking about something novel you could do to shake things up and draw attention to your product and image?

Even if your answer to the above is no, I still urge you to keep reading.

In case you were wondering, yes, I’m talking to you Monster, Rockstar, Vice, and American Apparel. I’m also talking to the executives of alcohol and tobacco companies who may have difficulty getting in touch with target demographics due to mainstream marketing barriers. And if you answered yes to any of my initial questions, I’m also talking to you.”

To read the complete letter and see the original article from Deal Breaker, click here.

brokerdealer, brokerdealer.com blog, Lazard Assest Management, New York Post, Paige A Jennings, Veronica Vain, wall street, Wall Street Intern

How To Get Shorty Stocks in Shanghai: Even Confucius is Confused

get shortyBrokerDealer.com blog update profiles the challenges of getting short shares listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, courtesy of extract from 06 March WSJ report by Gregor Hunter “Bejing Comes Up Short With Stock Bets”

A week after China allowed foreign investors to bet against shares on the mainland, no one had taken up the challenge. Industry officials say the rules that govern how the short selling should be done make it nearly impossible to bet against the stocks.

The opening of Chinese shares to short selling came as part of the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, which gives foreign investors unprecedented access to China’s main stock market in Shanghai. The connection opened in November and trading volume has been weak in its initial months.

Regulators approved short selling via Stock Connect beginning on Monday, and no shares were sold short during the first week of trading, according to data from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Asked whether Stock Connect currently permits short selling of shares, Andy Maynard, global head of trading and execution services at CLSA said: “In theory, yes it does. In practice, no it doesn’t.”

To access brokerdealers in China-marketplace, BrokerDealer.com provides a comprehensive database that can be downloaded.

According to the Stock Connect rules, shares must be loaned out by exchange participants, which generally means brokers. But they typically don’t have shares to lend, instead those shares generally come from custodians or asset managers. And loans of shares between companies—even if they are affiliates of the same bank or fund manager—are prohibited.

“There’s no way you can get the stock into the exchange participant account for that exchange participant to be able to lend to the Street,” CLSA’s Maynard said.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing chief executive Charles Li said that he didn’t know why no shares were shorted in the first week, but that the exchange was “not concerned”.

He acknowledged that the rules made it difficult to short in China. “Only brokers and broker affiliates can participate. If they’re not able to lend, there’s not a lot of shares to borrow from,” Mr. Li said

For the full story from the WSJ, please click here