Mindbody IPO Continues In Recent Fitness Trend

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On the tail of FitBit’s IPO filing last week, brokerdealer.com blog update profiles fitness software company, Mindbody, filing for its own IPO, on Monday, May 11, 2015. Mindbody is a cloud-based software provider in the health, wellness and beauty industries. Their software is most commonly used in fitness-centered businesses such as gyms and yoga studios. Mindbody’s initial primary focus was on business management software for wellness and fitness boutiques, when it was founded in 1998, and since then they have expanded to spas and beauty salons as well. The way the business works is businesses, such as gyms, spas, and yoga studios, pay a monthly fee to use the software. Mindbody currently serves more than 42,000 local business subscribers in 124 countries and territories.

The Mindbody IPO will be listed under the symbol MB, but has not selected an exchange yet. Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and UBS Investment Bank are the joint bookrunners on the deal. No pricing terms were disclosed.

This update is courtesy of the Pacific Coast Business Times’ article by Elijah Brumback, “Mindbody targets global expansion with IPO“. An excerpt of the article is below.

Mindbody, best known for its business management software for health and wellness companies, is going public with a target of raising $100 million.

In a deal that’s been heralded as the first non-bank stock offering in decades for a company based in San Luis Obispo, Mindbody filed its offering statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 11.

An IPO has long been expected for the growing company, which recently debuted its new headquarters complex located on Tank Farm Road near the SLO airport. The company counts 42,000 local business subscribers in 124 countries, with revenues of $70 million in 2014.

Company CEO Rick Stollmeyer, who owns just over 11.2 percent of the firm, told the Business Times going public will help push the software firm’s global expansion.

“Our mission is to help wellness-based businesses be more successful,” he said. “This [IPO] enables us to do even more of that.”

After years of development, Mindbody rolled out a major corporate wellness platform last year and raised almost $100 million in venture capital to become San Luis Obispo County’s 11th-largest employer and fourth-largest private-sector job creator with about 900 employees on the Central Coast. The company’s headcount is expected to grow to roughly 1,100 in the next several years.

To continue reading about Mindbody’s IPO filing, click here.

 

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

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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.

 

The Swiss National Bank Shocks Brokerdealers

OB-JT492_franc0_E_20100831084612Brokerdealer.com blog update courtesy of William Watts from MarketWatch.

Brokerdealers around the world were shocked after the Swiss National Bank unexpectedly announced on Thursday that they would be scrapping a three-year-old cap on the franc. As a result, it sent the currency soaring against the euro while stocks plunged out of fear. Although the market has seemed to bounce back caution should still be taken.

Don’t be too quick to look past the turmoil that swept global financial markets after Switzerland’s central bank unexpectedly scrapped a cap on the value of its currency versus the euro.

While European and U.S. equities largely regained their footing after a panicky round of selling in the wake of the decision, dangers may still lurk in some corners of the market. Here are the potential shock waves to look out for:MW-DD519_eurchr_20150115121520_ZH

Needless to say, the Swiss franc, which had long been held down by the Swiss National Bank’s controversial cap, exploded to the upside. The euro EURCHF, +0.66%  is down 15% and the U.S. dollar USDCHF, +1.69%  remains down nearly 14% versus the so-called Swissie after having plunged even further in the immediate aftermath of the move.

Since the Swiss National Bank had given no indication it was set to move — indeed, it had previously said it would defend the euro/Swiss franc currency floor with the “utmost determination” — investors were holding large dollar/Swiss franc and euro/Swiss franc long positions, noted George Saravelos, currency strategist at Deutsche Bank, in a note.

As a result, the moves Thursday likely resulted in some big losses on investor portfolios holding those positions, he said.

“This effectively serves as a large VaR [value-at-risk] shock to the market, at a time when investors were already sensitive to poor [profit-and-loss] performance for the year,” Saravelos wrote.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Goldman Sachs on Thursday closed what had previously been one of its top trade recommendations for 2015: shorting the Swiss franc versus the Swedish krona SEKCHF, +1.26% after the franc jumped as much as 14% on the day versus its Swedish counterpart..

Douglas Borthwick, managing director at Chapdelaine Foreign Exchange, said forex participants are bracing for aftershocks.

“We expect that few risk-management algorithms in G-20 currencies were prepared for greater than 20% moves in a currency pair, for this reason the chance of a binary outcome is significant,” he said, in a note. “Either participants gained or lost considerable amounts.”

Volatility

The Swiss National Bank’s move serves to underline the theme that volatility is back and here to stay.

For U.S. companies, trade exposure to Switzerland is small. And that means the direct impact is likely to be more of a ripple than a wave, said Wouter Sturkenboom, senior investment strategist at Russell Investments in London.

But the turmoil that followed the decision shows that markets are vulnerable to shifts by central banks which have largely been on hold since implementing a range of extraordinary measures in the aftermath of the financial crisis, he said.

“It is adding to this general disquiet in markets that things are volatile and things are changing and central banks are changing,” Sturkenboom said in a phone interview.

“I think that’s maybe the underlying cause [for the volatility in U.S. stocks], especially when you’ve had such a good run; valuations in the U.S. are stretched and expensive,” he said.

Emerging markets

Investors will also likely keep an eye on European banks exposed to central and Eastern Europe. Before 2008, households in several countries in the region, particularly Hungary and Poland, took out mortgages denominated in Swiss francs, attracted by low rates, noted William Jackson, senior emerging markets economist at Capital Economics.

Those households got a shock in 2008-09 and in 2011 when the franc rose, boosting debt servicing costs. Another 15% jump in the franc against most Central and Eastern European currencies Thursday morning could lead to further worries, Jackson said, though he argued that the situation appears much more manageable than in the past.

In Hungary, a law allows households to convert foreign-currency mortgages into forint-denominated mortgages at the exchange rate that prevailed in 2014, Jackson notes, while in Poland, the Swiss franc lending was restricted to higher quality borrowers.

 

Nigerian Stock Market offers Remote Trading

ThisDayLive LogoBrokerDealer.com blog update courtesy of extracts from ThisDayLive.com

 

Often referred to as alternative trading system, electronic communication network has revolutionised trading on stock exchanges around the world. Despite initial apathy, dealing member firms of the Nigerian Stock Exchange are now embracing remote trading in a bid to woo retail investors writes, Eromosele Abiodun.

Following the introduction of technology, stock markets around the world have grown in leaps and bounds. The Nigerian stock market is a special example of the extent institutions can go if the right steps are taken in the right direction.

The impact of technology on the Nigeria stock market has been phenomenal, indicating the extent institutions can go when the right tools are employed. Technology indeed has taken control of the guts of business and made it possible for tiny, agile companies and stockbroking firms to become contenders. Continue reading

BofA Breathes Some Life Into Bank ETFs

BrokerDealer.com blog post courtesy of extracts from ETF Trends.com, written by Todd Shriber.

 

ETFTrends logoMoribund financial services exchange traded funds got some much-needed good news Wednesday when Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) announced the Federal Reserve granted it permission to raise its dividend to common stockholders for the first time in seven years.

BofA said it will pay a quarterly dividend of 5 cents per share up from the paltry penny a share it had been paying since early 2009. Today’s news removes some of the embarrassment suffered by the bank in April when it said it would be forced to suspend its planned $4 billion share repurchase plan and its previously announced dividend increase due to a calculation error related to the company’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch during the financial crisis.

The BofA dividend news sent shares of the Financial Select Sector SPDR (NYSEArca: XLF), the largest U.S. sector ETF, up 0.6% while the iShares U.S. Financials ETF (NYSEArca: IYF) added 0.55%. XLF and IYF have BofA weights of 5.76% and 4.41%, respectively. Continue reading