The Holidays will Come Late for Some BrokerDealers this Year

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BrokerDealer.com blog update courtesy of extract from Investment News

For employees at American Realty Capital, a nontraded real estate investment trust, were notified by email that their annual holiday would be postponed.

“As you know, we ordinarily throw our holiday party in January,” according to the email from Mr. Schorsch. “This year, however, we have decided to move the celebration to warmer times, likely May or June.”

“We have not yet decided on a venue for the event, but rest assured, as always, it will be memorable,” according to the email, a copy of which was obtained by InvestmentNews. “We will keep you advised of our plans as we get closer to the date.”

wall-st-xmas-treeThe email was signed by Mr. Schorsch and his three partners at ARC: Bill Kahane, Mike Weil and Peter Budko.

Andrew Backman, a spokesman for ARC, said the email was accurate but declined to comment as to the specifics of why the holiday party was delayed.

Wall Street has a history of canceling holiday celebrations for fear of drawing criticism during stressful times.

Wall Street has a history of canceling holiday  celebrations for fear of drawing criticism during stressful times. In an attempt to keep a low profile, The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in 2009 told its employees it would not host a corporate Christmas party; the investment bank also prohibited its employees from funding their own parties.

ARC and RCS Capital Corp., the broker-dealer holding company of which Mr. Schorsch is executive chairman, have faced intense scrutiny since a related company, American Realty Capital Properties Inc., at the end of October revealed a $23 million accounting error over the first half of the year that was intentionally not corrected.

Most other BrokerDealers will be celebrating the holidays on Wall Street this season.

For the full story from Investment News click here

Broker-Dealer Burnishes Brand With Buyside-Focused Technology Solutions

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BrokerDealer.com blog update courtesy of extract from 09 December story published in Markets Media and reported by Steve Marlin.

Agency Broker WallachBeth Raises Tech Bar

WallachBeth Capital, a provider of institutional execution for buy-side investment managers, recently appointed quantitative trading veteran Matthew Rowley to the newly created role of chief technology officer, signaling the firm’s commitment to delivering customized services that address specific and often complex order-execution and related business-process needs.

The company’s founders, Michael Wallach and David Beth, “have a vision of the industry becoming even more technologically driven,” Rowley told Markets Media.

matt rowley wallachbeth

Matt Rowley, Wallachbeth Capital’s new chief technology officer

Rowley joined WallachBeth from Crédit Agricole Cheuvreux, where he was credited with helping the firm attain a leadership position in the global electronic brokerage space.

“My main focus had been more on the algorithmic side — slicing and dicing of orders,” said Rowley, who holds an advanced degree in applied statistics from Oxford University. “Something that’s been really interesting to me throughout my whole career is artificial intelligence. I’ve been working on and off trying to integrate that into various firms I’ve been at, in different products. But it’s only in recent years that some of the cutting-edge techniques are such that you can get near-human performance in some aspects.”

Rowley’s background includes senior executive roles for several of the financial industry’s leading firms. Prior to joining Cheuvreux, he was global head of advanced trading products at financial software provider Fidessa. He began his career as a quantitative analyst in the strategic risk management advisory group at First Chicago Corp.

WallachBeth’s Tools Hope to Educate

Rowley’s current focus is on developing “trader intelligence” tools that filter information programmatically and algorithmically and put the information in the hands of capable traders who make decisions. These decision tools can be for traders on the buy side or sell side, or portfolio managers.trading tech

“Market participants are making decisions by relying on the tools they have,” he said. “A trader may have Bloomberg or another market-data terminal, and they have order management systems that give an idea of historical reports, clients order and history. Oftentimes, that information is disparate, and as a human being, you can’t quite process everything. You have to query and follow a nonlinear path to get the information you need and ask yourself questions.”

WallachBeth aims to educate clients about exchange-traded funds and provides “a very unique execution model around that,” said Rowley. “We’re looking to expand that across different asset classes as a one-stop shop. The quantitative tools we’re building are important to that whole process.”

 

To read the entire story from MarketsMedia, please click here.

Bitcoin and Brokerdealers

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Broker Dealer.com blog update courtesy of extract from CoinDesk

Bitcoin is a form of currency that is tied directly to the Internet and is the world’s first free market, decentralized global currency. It is operated through an open-source software so there is no central control unlike the US dollar or Euro. Similarly to gold, only 21,000,000 Bitcoins will ever be created so the value of the Bitcoin continues to rise as time goes on.Bitcoin Bitcoins can be exchanged for goods and services as well as currencies such as the US dollar and the Euro. As long as people trust that Bitcoin has value, people will continue to invest in it.

Bitcoin is still very small by market capitalization when compared to the traditional markets, and the need for more liquidity within exchanges is an ongoing issue in the industry. However, a number of startups are looking to attract the traditional investment sector to cryptocurrencies.

SecondMarket was expected to launch an institutional bitcoin exchange this year, but it still only offers the Bitcoin Investment Trust, its managed investment vehicle. Other companies looking to cater to larger investors include exchanges itBit and Coinsetter, which are both based in the finance hub of New York City.

Mirror, formally known as Vaurum, is an institutional-grade exchange platform for bitcoin investors.  The platform’s exchange is currently invitation-only but customers can sign up to request access. “We’re currently onboarding investors, market makers, over-the-counter (OTC) traders and bitcoin businesses,” said Bhama. “We evaluate each sign up on a case by case basis and will be sending out invites at an increasing rate as we prepare to open it up publicly.”

Find your own Brokerdealer that will help you understand the Bitcoin market and how to begin collecting your Bitcoins or invest in a platform such as Mirror.

From Russia With Love: BrokerDealer and Banker to Russia Billionaires

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Andrey Akimov, photo courtesy of Simon Dawson/Bloomberg LP

Andrey Akimov, photo courtesy of Simon Dawson/Bloomberg LP

Brokerdealer.com blog update courtesy of extract from 24 Oct Bloomberg LP coverage by reporters Irina Reznik and Anna Baraulina

When he’s not cruising the streets of Austria in his gray Tesla Model S, Andrey Akimov can often be found behind a desk on the seventh floor of a nondescript office building just across the Moskva River from the Kremlin.

Two bullet-proof doors and one small sign are the only clues that this is the control center of a financier who’s helped turn some of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies into multibillionaires. For a man who honed his trade in the hushed back rooms of Vienna and Zurich during the Cold War and who is now, as friends say, the most secretive banker in a country run by a former spy, this is how it should be.

While Akimov, 61, hasn’t avoided sanctions against the lender he’s run for a dozen years, state-controlled OAO Gazprombank, Russia’s third largest, he has not been singled out personally. By contrast, billionaire Yuri Kovalchuk, the largest shareholder of Bank Rossiya, the 16th biggest, was blacklisted by the U.S. in its first round of penalties over the Ukraine conflict in March for being what the Treasury called a “cashier” for Putin. Akimov, who’s never appeared on a global rich list, owns about 0.2 percent of the bank, equal to $1.7 million of shareholder equity, company filings show.

Power Broker

Akimov occupies a key position in Putin’s intricate power system and the fact that few people know it is a tribute to his skill as a behind-the-scenes broker, said UBS AG (UBSN) Russia Chairman Rair Simonyan, who has known Akimov for decades. Simonyan, 67, joined UBS in January, after running Morgan Stanley (MS)’s Moscow office for 14 years and working as an adviser for eight months to OAO Rosneft (ROSN) Chief Executive Officer Igor Sechin, who was added to the U.S. blacklist in April.

“Andrey is able to maintain professional relationships with everyone in Putin’s inner circle and beyond, even though some of them won’t even talk to each other,” Simonyan said in an interview in Moscow. “These people accept his mediation, regardless of their attitudes toward each other.”

Akimov, a fluent speaker of English and, like Putin, German, has never given a media interview, according to Gazprombank’s press service. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, declined to comment on the president’s relationship with Akimov.

“Andrey is a very, very secretive man, even for a banker,” Simonyan said. “And Gazprombank is a very Russian bank. Foreigners wouldn’t understand it.”

When Akimov took over Gazprombank in 2002, it was little more than a “piggy bank” for managers of the world’s largest gas producer, with less than $3.8 billion of assets, Simonyan said. Now it has $96 billion.

For the full article from Bloomberg LP, please click here