Blog

Two industries — retail trading and prediction markets — are growing at extraordinary speed, capturing the time and money of millions of people, wrapped in the language of empowerment and democratization. They look different on the surface. But spend any time with both, and a striking picture emerges: they share the same user base, the same psychological architecture, and the same uncomfortable gap between how they are marketed and what they actually deliver.

Access alone does not eliminate asymmetry. In many ways, it simply exposes it.

Plans to launch a new equities exchange on Wall Street, rivalling the existing institutions of NYSE, Nasdaq and CBOE, have drawn a lot of attention over the past two weeks. Major US market-makers including Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Virtu Financial have banded together to propose MEMX, a high-tech low-cost alternative to the existing equities platforms. Why are they doing this? The answer is simple – fees.

On October 31st 2018, Select Vantage was honoured to accept an invitation to ring the opening bell at the Toronto Stock Exchange for the city’s Hospital for Sick Children (known also as Sick Kids).

Technology has reduced the role that client networks and personal insight play in the advice that financial institutions provide to their customers, or so argued Bloomberg’s Matt Levine last week.

Banks and financial institutio

On Monday I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel discussion in Brussels on the evolution and disruption of financial regulation in the 21st century, hosted by New Europe, a leading European affairs publication. My fellow panellists and I – coming from across the financial industry spectrum, including participants, advisory, research, and regulation (though all speaking in a personal capacity) – engaged in a wide-ranging conversation on what we had learnt from the first few months of MiFID II, its impact and unintended consequences, and made some forecasts for the future.

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland never fails to attract the financial world’s leading thinkers, and January 2018’s gathering was no different. We’ve recently been writing about the manner in which global markets make global rules, so one discussion that was of particular interest to us was a talk on “Global Markets in a Fractured World”. The panel was moderated by Maria Bartiromo and featured Adena Friedman of NASDAQ, Stephen A. Schwarzman of Blackstone, Frank Appel of Deutsche Post, Tidjane Thiam of Credit Suisse, and Brian T. Moynihan of Bank of America.

Today marks the date of implementation of MiFID II, the most sweeping legislative package ever undertaken by the European Union, or indeed ever applied to the global financial services industry. The real effects of its implementation will take some time to become visible, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for them along with the rest of our industry in months to come. What effects might we begin to see in the shorter-term however? And to what extent will these reflect the underlying intent behind MiFID II?