China IPO Market Mints Two More Bejing Billionaires; Video Game Maker Kunlun Tech and Spring Airlines Execs Profit from China A-Share Market

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china billionairesBrokerDealer.com blog update courtesy of reporting from 3 Feb edition of Bloomberg LP.

Zhou Yahui, chairman and president of Beijing Kunlun Tech Co., became a billionaire after shares of the Internet video game developer more than doubled since its trading debut two weeks ago.

Zhou, 37, has a $1.7 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The stock surged by the 44 percent stock exchange limit at its trading debut on Jan. 21, and climbed by the maximum daily price increase of 10 percent for nine straight days.

The new billionaire is the second in China this week as investors are showing an increasing appetite for the nation’s initial public offerings. Kunlun Tech is also riding a rally in the Shenzhen Composite Index, which tracks equities on the smaller of China’s two stock exchanges, whose 8.3 percent return this year beat all benchmark indexes in Asia.

“Shares jumped because new stocks are rare in China’s A- share market,” said James Hu Jiaming, a Shanghai-based analyst from China brokerdealer Capital Securities Corp., adding that “online gaming has been riding a bull market since the second half of last year.”

There has been an “accelerated growth” in the online gaming industry, driven by the popularity of mobile-phone applications such as WeChat, he added.

The gains haven’t made Kunlun Tech expensive relative to its peers. The stock is trading at 34 times earnings, compared with 240 times for China’s information technology companies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Shenzhen index has a multiple of 37.

Spring Airlines Co. Chairman Wang Zhenghua became a billionaire yesterday as the stock surged following the company’s initial public offering, the first for a Chinese airline since 2002.

Shares of the low-cost carrier also jumped 44 percent on its trading debut on Jan. 21 and rose by the daily limit for a ninth day today, pushing his net worth to $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

 

Opus Bank Expands Into BrokerDealer Services

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Opus BankBrokerdealer.com blog update is courtesy of a press release from Opus Bank and found on MarketWatch

Opus Bank, a California-chartered commercial bank, provides high-value, relationship-based banking products, services, and solutions to its clients through its Retail Bank, Commercial Bank, Merchant Bank, and Correspondent Bank. They recently just expanded to provide brokerdealer services through a subsidiary called Opus Financial Partners.

Opus Bank (“Opus” or the “Bank”) OPB, -0.54% announced today that it has established and received regulatory approval for Opus Financial Partners, LLC (“Opus Financial Partners” or “OFP”), the broker-dealer subsidiary of the Bank. Opus Financial Partners will further enable Opus’ Merchant Bank to help its clients address their financial and advisory needs related to raising equity capital, targeted acquisition and divestiture strategies, general mergers and acquisitions, debt and equity financing, balance sheet restructuring, valuation, strategy, and performance improvement. Dale Cheney, Senior Managing Director, Head of the Merchant Bank, will also lead Opus Financial Partners.

Dale Cheney, Senior Managing Director, stated, “Opus Financial Partners’ capabilities complement Opus’ Merchant Bank by providing a comprehensive and integrated capital and advisory solution to lower middle-market companies, business owners, and private equity groups.” Cheney added, “The traditional investment banking model, with its layers of intermediaries and capital providers, is inefficient and outdated for today’s dynamic business environment where business owners and entrepreneurs are constantly challenged by limited time and resources. We partner with these executives and their companies to provide a sophisticated, one-stop capital and advisory solution that allows them to focus on building a successful business.”

Stephen H. Gordon, Opus Bank’s Founding Chairman, CEO & President, commented, “There is a void in the lower middle-market where access to debt and equity capital is limited and delivered inefficiently. Additionally, even successful companies that want to expand and grow their businesses typically don’t have access to the sophisticated M&A and other advisory services they need in order to capitalize on strategic opportunities and remain competitive. The capabilities provided through Opus’ Merchant Bank and through our broker-dealer, Opus Financial Partners, will help our clients to thoughtfully and strategically grow, capitalize or monetize their business.” Mr. Gordon concluded, “Having begun my career over 30 years ago as an investment banker, I recognize that we have an opportunity to fill a void and address a significant need by building a market-leading West Coast-based merchant bank that adheres to Opus’ entrepreneurial philosophy of partnering with our clients, as opposed to simply serving as transaction advisors.”

Flipping Burgers On Main Street v. Becoming a BrokerDealer on Wall Street: Glassdoor Survey Says:

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download (8)Brokerdealer.com blog update profiling recent study from job review site Glassdoor.com is courtesy of extract from eFinancialCareers.com with reporting by Beecher Tuttle.

People would rather work at In-N-Out Burger Than in Banking

Ok. That headline contains just a twinge of hyperbole. But the latest employer rankings show that Wall Street still has a ways to go in terms of improving its reputation and keeping workers happy.

Job review website Glassdoor recently came out with its Top 50 Places to Work, and not a single bank made the list. Now, you could make the argument that the hours required to make it on Wall Street would likely eliminate banks from contention, but several consulting firms made this year’s list. Consultants put in plenty of hours themselves and often have brutal travel schedules, yet they’re represented extremely well.

Bain finished second on the list, just behind Google, with a 4.4 rating (out of 5). Meanwhile, Boston Consulting Group finished 5th, just a few spots ahead of fellow consulting firm McKinsey, which at nine was nipped by In-N-Out Burger, known for its “fast-paced team environment.” So that’s three out of the top 10 for consulting, trumping every other industry, including tech.

Really, it shouldn’t come as that big of a surprise. Vault.com, which uses employee reviews to rank banks, accounting firms and consulting companies, reported similar rankings in consulting, with Bain, McKinsey and BCG topping the list. But as an industry, consulting took banks and accounting firms to the woodshed. McKinsey, the top ranked consulting firm, finished more than a full point above the highest-ranked accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and seven-tenths of a point ahead of J.P. Morgan, the top-ranked bank.

Maybe the reviews are accurate and quantify a true measure of happiness. Or it could be that bankers are chronic complainers, no matter what the reality. A separate study found that bankers are just as satisfied in their careers as tech executives yet they were twice as likely to complain about their compensation, despite making more.

For the record, Goldman Sachs finished highest among the six biggest U.S. banks in Glassdoor’s survey, earning a score of 3.7. Morgan Stanley ended with a 3.6, J.P. Morgan a 3.5, Bank of America and Citigroup each received a 3.3, and Wells Fargo trailed the group with a 3.2.

Another BrokerDealer-Only Bond Trading Platform: RVQB

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BRVQB brokerdealer only bond trading platformrokerdealer.com blog update courtesy of extract from Traders Magazine, one of the sell-side’s top publications.

Quantitative Brokers and RiskVal have formed a partnership to create and deliver a fixed income trading platform, called RVQB.

The new sellside bond trading platform “combines powerful real-time analytics with seamless access to QB algorithms for best execution,” according to a press statement. Quantitative Brokers is a provider of agency algorithms for fixed income and futures markets. RiskVal Financial Solutions is a trading analytics and real-time risk management provider.

The RVQB platform integrates QB algorithms and RiskVal trading analytics and aims “to provide traders with real-time control and transparency into their outright and relative value executions.” The solution provides the bond trader with screens that can route orders to Legger, QB’s multi-leg execution strategy, for basis and relative value trading. During a demonstration of the trading platform in Manhattan yesterday, a bond trader can fill in a single trade with reduced keystrokes and data entry.

QB’s Legger algorithm executes user-defined structures with any ratio and number of legs across cash US Treasury and futures markets. A transactional cost analysis report is generated for each execution, providing full post-trade transparency on the order and slippage performance.

“Fixed income traders are continually looking for better ways to actively manage their enterprise-wide risk,” said Christian Hauff, CEO and co-founder of QB. “By marrying QB’s best execution algorithms with RiskVal’s proven relative value analytics, we have created a unique platform that integrates powerful trade discovery with superior execution tools.”

“The fixed income markets are rapidly evolving, and traders are seeking access to smarter and more transparent execution,” said Jordan Hu, founder and CEO of RiskVal. “As the market structure evolution continues, we are excited to address some of the key issues that fixed income traders face in the move to a more electronically-driven model.”

In 2014, both FINRA and the SEC approved QB as a broker-dealer for government securities.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto: Cambridge to offer robo-offering in 2016

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robo-offeringBrokerdealer.com blog update courtesy of InvestmentNews’ Bruce Kelly.

Independent broker-dealer, Cambridge Investment Research Inc. announced plans to have a competitive robo-type offering that works in sync with its 3,000 advisers’ practices in 2016. It is the independent broker-dealer’s aim to incorporate an online advice platform as a tool for reps.

“It’s an opportunity for us to give advisers tools that are similar to other offerings but [which] don’t take them out of the middle of the relationship with the client,” said Amy Webber, president of Cambridge. “I don’t think it’s a threat. We have to figure out how to integrate it and we have to embrace what an investor wants from it. It’s a low cost tool for the next gen client who typically doesn’t have a lot of money” that ultimately will contain a pay-for-advice component, she said.

Some type of robo-offering will be a 2016 technology initiative at Cambridge. “I think we will have pieces of it,” Ms. Webber said. “It could be a digital partner to the planning and advice process and [include] tools we already give our advisers. Just like websites didn’t exist 20 years ago, it’s another tool we will plug into this independent model that keeps evolving.”

So-called robo-advisers, or automated wealth management platforms, appear to be gaining traction among traditional brokerage and registered investment advisers. In the fall, Commonwealth Financial Network CEO Wayne Bloom said the firm was looking at how it could develop a robo-adviser type offering that meshes with the high-end practices of its 1,700 registered reps and advisers.

Also in the fall, high-profile advisory firm Ritholtz Wealth Managementlaunched its own robo-adviser platform with the help of technology startup Upside Financial. In October, Charles Schwab Corp. said it was introducing an online advice platform for retail investors in the first quarter of this year and an online platform that advisers can use with their clients in the second quarter.

“In our space, I see them as more of a digital partner to what the adviser does,” said Ms. Webber, who made her comments in San Antonio, Texas, on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Financial Services Institute. “Our human advisers will keep doing the great work that they do, but Cambridge has to give them some tools where they can talk to their clients who will say to them, ‘Hey, my neighbor is using a robo-adviser.’”

Children of older clients are using robo-advisers, and then they bring what the robo-adviser produces to meetings and ask advisers what to make of it, she said. “That’s where the value of the adviser comes in,” she said. Robo-advisers will be attractive to the so-called do-it-yourself investor, who first gained attention in the stock market boom of the 1990s, she said.

An internal group of advisers is looking at the issue, she said. Current robo-offerings vary. “They have financial planning tools, such as a plan and a proposal,” she said. “But, do we really want the end client trading? Is there a stop at that point that pings the adviser and asks, ‘What do you think?’”

For the original article from InvestmentNews, click here.