Since 2008, there has been an increase in electronic trading of fixed income securities, along with a decrease in inventory held by larger dealers and banks.

“If we look at some of the subtle changes in market structure that have come about, we see non-traditional liquidity providers, or price makers, coming up within the marketplace,” Bill Vulpis, managing director at KCG BondPoint, told Markets Media. “By non-traditional, I mean companies other than banks and large sell-side firms, including smaller broker dealers who are reliant upon electronic platforms to make markets.”

According to a January 2015 study by Greenwich Associates, 80% of institutional investors report difficulties executing corporate bond trades of more than $15 million, reflecting decline in market liquidity caused by the pullback of fixed-income dealers in the wake of new and more stringent capital reserve requirements.

With dealer inventories shrinking, investors’ search for new liquidity providers is proving a boon to the fast-developing ranks of electronic trading platforms, according to Greenwich. All-to-all trading accounted for an estimated 6% of electronically executed U.S. trades in 2014.

To read the full article from Markets Media, click here.

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Convicted felon David Scott Cacchione, who was barred from the brokerage industry in 2009 for helping orchestrate a $100 million fraud scheme, has been barred again by the Securities and Exchange Commission after he tried, while still incarcerated, to re-enter the securities industry through a registered investment adviser.

Mr. Cacchione, 50, attempted, as others barred from the brokerage industry have, to play on the dual licensing of brokers and investment advisers to resurrect a career in the securities industry.

Mr. Cacchione pleaded guilty in 2009 to securities fraud for pledging the securities of unknowing clients to secure more than $45 million in personal loans for a friend. The scheme eventually resulted in almost $47 million in losses, according to the FBI. He also engaged in unauthorized trading in the accounts of clients, including a local children’s charity and an elderly widow, according to the SEC.

Mr. Cacchione was sentenced to 60 months in jail followed by three years of supervised release and ordered to pay nearly $50 million in restitution. According to the SEC, he had paid only $502 of that as of last August.

For the entire article from InvestmentNews, click here.

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Last year, China’s Alibaba Group unleashed a monster of an IPO, the world’s biggest to date. But this year, Japan has a monster of its own that by all accounts could blow past the Alibaba listing to become the most massive offering of stock ever seen.

It is easily the hottest topic around the boardrooms and izakayas (after-work drinking halls) across Tokyo: the highly anticipated initial public offering of Japan Post Holdings, the finance-ministry-held behemoth that combines the national postal service with the country’s biggest savings bank and major insurer. Its financial arm alone had ¥205 trillion ($1.71 trillion) worth of assets under management as of December, roughly one-third the entire annual GDP of Japan.

The offering has been more than a decade in the making, surviving fierce political controversy since the idea of privatization was first introduced. The issue was a sensitive one because not only does Japan Post bring in a massive amount of revenue, but also it’s the nation’s largest employer.

Finally, with the government determined to shore up Japan’s debt-bedraggled finances, the stock appears ready to go to market sometime this autumn, with the ministry having set a goal of ¥4 trillion yen, or about $33 billion, for the divestment proceeds. It has earmarked the funds for rebuilding parts of northeastern Japan destroyed by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Such an amount would dwarf Alibaba’s BABA, +1.06%  $25 billion haul — to date the largest in history. Still, much of the details have yet to surface, and according to the Nikkei Asian Review, the event may come as a trio of listings: Japan Post Holdings, along with separate tickers for its subsidiaries Japan Post Bank and Japan Post Insurance. Likewise, some reckonings see the issue as pulling in a somewhat more modest $10 billion-$20 billion.

In discussing the big Japan Post sale, those with longer memories note similarities with the situation a quarter-century ago, when the government privatized its fixed-line carrier, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone 9432, +0.28% NTT, +0.85% Unusually for Japan, its listing was a big event not just for institutions, but for retail investors as well.

For the entire article from MarketWatch, click here

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The Securities and Exchange Commission is not fulfilling its duty to protect retail investors, particularly in how it regulates financial advisers, a number of consumer groups asserted in a letter to the agency.

The eight-page letter dated March 10 outlines several areas that the groups say the SEC “can no longer afford to relegate … to a back burner.”

Most of the letter concentrates on ways the groups want the agency to improve regulation of financial advisers and urged the SEC to take “concrete steps” to raise investment-advice standards for brokers.

The Dodd-Frank law gave the SEC the authority to promulgate a uniform fiduciary standard for retail investment advice that would require all advisers to act in the best interests of their clients. The SEC has not acted. Meanwhile, the Department of Labor is poised to re-propose its own fiduciary-duty rule for advice to retirement accounts.

The topic has split the five-member commission. Chairwoman Mary Jo White has promised since November to make her position on fiduciary duty known in the “short term.”

Duane Thompson, senior policy adviser for Fi360, a fiduciary-duty training firm, agreed with the consumer groups that fiduciary duty has languished.

“The SEC seems to have looked more at capital-formation issues,” Mr. Thompson said. “The elephant in the living room is the uniform fiduciary standard. While Mary Jo White has repeatedly said it’s a priority, I’ve never seen it show up on the SEC’s regulatory agenda.”

Other topics the letter highlights include strengthening financial adviser disclosure about conflicts and compensation, reforming revenue-sharing, limiting mandatory arbitration for investor disputes, and beefing up regulation of risky financial products, including some kinds of exchange-traded funds.

“We are concerned that the Securities and Exchange Commission — which has always prided itself on serving as ‘the investors’ advocate’ — appears in recent years to have strayed from its primary focus on its investor protection mission,” the letter stated. “Given the vital role that average investors play in our markets and the overall economy, and the serious shortcomings that exist in the regulatory protections they receive, it is time in our view for these issues to be prioritized.”

Click here to read the entire article from InvestmentNews.

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New York-based RCS Capital Corp. has finalized its acquisition of Overland Park-based VSR Group and its wholly owned subsidiary VSR Financial Services Inc.

RCS, a full-service investment firm, said VSR adds $12.3 billion in assets under administration and 264 independent financial advisers to the Cetera Financial Group platform.

“We believe VSR is positioned to contribute value to our network of firms, and we are excited to begin our partnership with VSR’s leadership team to bring industry-leading platforms and tools to their financial advisers,” Cetera Financial CEO Lawrence Roth said in a release. “The firm adds a strong family culture which complements the individual cultures of the existing Cetera Financial Group firms. VSR has an established presence, predominantly in the Midwest, and we look forward to working with their advisors to bring customized financial solutions to the growing number of Americans looking for independent financial advice.”

VSR, a broker-dealer firm, was founded more than 30 years ago and is the second-largest broker-dealer domiciled in Kansas.

For the original article from the Kansas City Business Journal, click here.

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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.

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Young bankers fresh out of college are in high demand for private equity firms. Firms what the brightest and best that show great tenacity and enthusiasm for Wall Street. Firms are so aggressive about finding the best candidates that recruiters are interviewing potential employees up to 18 months before the start of the actual job.

They are only in their early to mid-20s, but some young bankers on Wall Street are the most sought-after financiers around, with lucrative pay packages dangling before them.

Junior investment bankers who graduated from college only last year are being madly courted by private equity firms like Apollo Global Management, the Blackstone Group, Bain Capital and theCarlyle Group in a scramble that kicked off last weekend. After back-to-back interviews, many are now fielding offers for jobs that won’t start until the summer of 2016.

This process has become an annual rite by private equity firms, which raise money from investors (like pension funds) to buy entire companies. But it has grown more frenzied since the financial crisis, and it started this year weeks earlier than many in the industry had expected. Fearful of missing the best talent being developed at investment banks, the giants of private equity have turned Wall Street’s white-collar entry-level workers into a hot commodity.

“It’s as if these were star athletes,” said Adam Zoia, chief executive of the recruiting firm Glocap Search, who helps private equity firms hire young workers. “The irony is they are professionals six, seven months out of undergrad. It’s hard to imagine you can tell if someone’s a star or not.”

For the young bankers, who are known as analysts, the recruiting race is an important step on a journey to becoming a Wall Street tycoon who can command a seven-figure (or more) pay package. These workers, graduates of elite colleges, often hope to spend two years at investment banks, learning the basics of corporate finance, before leaving for private equity firms, where they can use those skills to make investments. That career path makes them prime candidates for an elite business school, or something even more financially rewarding.

Even though these youthful analysts are starting at big Wall Street firms, the sector’s reputation has lost some of its sheen since the financial crisis. At the same time, Silicon Valley is luring away talent.

But private equity firms can offer higher pay to young bankers. A private equity associate — one who is just three years out of college — can earn as much as $300,000 a year, including salary and bonus. That is roughly double what a second-year banker might earn at Goldman Sachs. “Private equity is the preferable place to be in terms of compensation,” said Jeff P. Visithpanich, a managing director at the compensation consulting firm Johnson Associates.

While data is hard to come by, a December report from Vettery, a start-up recruiting firm, said that private equity was the single most popular destination for Wall Street’s junior workers. Roughly 36 percent of junior bankers with two-year contracts in 2012 have now joined private equity firms, compared with 27.5 percent who stayed in the same division at their bank, Vettery said.

It may seem surprising that these untested financiers are being so heavily courted when the overall unemployment rate of workers between the ages of 20 and 24 in January was more than twice as high as the rate for those 25 and older.

But the process of hiring these workers has grown only more frenzied since the crisis, as financial firms increasingly believe they must work harder to attract ambitious graduates. The banks, from which these workers are being poached, are raising salaries or offering additional days off in an effort to retain them.

To read the complete article from the New York Times, click here.

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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.

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Mischler is the securities industry’s only federally-certified BD and maintains a significant footprint across both primary debt and equities capital markets where the firm serves as a underwriter, manager, co-manager and/or selling group member for corporate issuers bringing new debt or equities to the investment marketplace. The firm is also one of few in the industry that operates a 24/6 “high touch + high tech” trading desk that facilitates agency-only, direct market access and best execution for institutional clients transacting in US domestic markets and 100+ international equities markets. The firm’s website is located at www.mischlerfinancial.com

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