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’From one I-bank to another: Your Q3′s rubbish
Posted by Cardiff Garcia on Sep 22 20:23. Comment.Another big equity selloff today, with financials leading the pack down; in other words, the perfect setting for I-banks to start carpetbombing each other with forecast markdowns.
We kid. But almost on cue, More…
Protium’s acid reflux [updated]
Posted by Neil Hume on Apr 28 10:18. Comment.Plenty of column inches on Thursday are devoted to the wind up of Protium, the Cayman Islands-based vehicle created by Barclays to warehouse a portfolio of highly toxic credit market assets.
According to the FT, More…
Barclays disappoints
Posted by Neil Hume on Apr 27 09:20. Comment.Barclays has kicked off the first quarter reporting season for the UK banking sector on Wednesday.
But its trading update hasn’t gone down too well in the City of London.
That’s because headline revenues were lower than expected, More…
Japan’s trading desks: ‘Situation normal’, BAU or AFU?
Posted by Gwen Robinson on Mar 18 10:00. Comment.What is wrong with this picture?:
Most major investment banks and brokers, including JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, BarCap, Goldman Sachs and UBS in Tokyo still insist it’s ‘business as usual’ in the wake of last Friday’s massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan. More…
Shaking up the UK banking sector
Posted by Neil Hume on Jan 12 15:29. Comment.A couple of months from now the Independent Committee on Banking will reveal the range of options it is considering to promote “financial stability and competition” in the UK banking sector.
But will the ICB opt for a break-up or a shake-up? That’s the question Rohith Chandra-Rajan, More…
US equities: the least worst place of last resort
Posted by John McDermott on Dec 10 16:00. Comment.Like a tapas bar owner in central Pamploma, FT Alphaville is well-attuned to bullish sounds.
2011 outlooks are accumulating in the Long Room, where you can sniff a strong whiff of qualified optimism for the year ahead. More…
The wonder years – Diamond Bob edition
Posted by Neil Hume on Dec 01 14:58. Comment.Warning: this Bloomberg hagiography of Diamond Bob is only for those with a cast-iron constitution. Here’s a taster:
As 1,100 managing directors from Barclays Capital descended on the Grosvenor House hotel near London’s Hyde Park in late September, More…
When a good deal comes back to haunt you, redux
Posted by Joseph Cotterill on Oct 22 11:55. Comment.Talk about courtroom drama.
From the closing arguments of Lehman’s suit against Barclays (that’s the one alleging an $11bn ‘windfall’ asset grab when Barclays snapped up its best bits in 2008):
(Bloomberg) Final details of the distribution of billions of dollars of assets as part of Barclays Plc’s purchase of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s brokerage unit were never approved, More…
What Hurd, Diamond and Green have in common
Posted by Gwen Robinson on Sep 08 10:00. Comment.It’s getting ugly in executive-recruitment land. “HP sues to block Hurd’s move to Oracle”, reads one FT headline on Wednesday, while another proclaims: “Outrage over Diamond promotion”, while the BBC’s Robert Peston asks, More…
It’s so macro, man. (But maybe not for long)
Posted by Paul Murphy on Jul 12 21:33. Comment.As American equity markets awaited the onset of the earnings season (Alcoa kicks off, after the bell on Monday), consider this factoid from Matthew Rothman, Barcap’s top quant research man in New York: More…
Cowdery heads for Axa resolution
Posted by Gwen Robinson on Jun 14 08:05. Comment.Clive Cowdery is back in the limelight, as the insurance entrepreneur’s Resolution Group confirmed talks to buy part of Axa’s UK business for about £2.8bn.
Resolution shares have been suspended from trading on the London Stock Exchange on Monday ahead of a more detailed announcement, More…
The CDS inquisition, California edition
Posted by Stacy-Marie Ishmael on Mar 30 20:44. Comment.It was only a matter of time. California — following in the footsteps of Ireland and Iceland, Greece, Spain, and politicians of all stripes and nationalities — has called for an examination of credit default swaps sold against its bonds. More…
The great European SSA recovery. Save Spain?
Posted by Joseph Cotterill on Mar 11 10:57. Comment.For you, iffy European sovereign swap spreads, ze war iz over.
That’s for now, of course. Those swap spreads are tightening for the moment – and the SSA (supras, sub-sovereigns and agencies) and GGB (Government-guaranteed bonds) markets are coming with them. More…
Cat or Canary?
Posted by Neil Hume on Feb 15 15:16. Comment.Right, time for a little bit of perspective on the sovereign CDS are good/evil (delete as appropriate) debate, courtesy of BarCap.
The above charts show the relative size of the CDS market in the eurozone periphery as proportion of outstanding government debt. More…
Five ‘negatives’ and one ‘mixed’ – the BarCap take on US regulatory reform
Posted by Paul Murphy on Feb 09 20:52. Comment.Tricky presenting this table in viewable form, but here goes…
Click to enlarge, obviously. It’s in two parts.
You’ve got to feel for the bank analysis community right now. The Basel Committee comes out with a load of Basel, More…
ETF providers of the third kind
Posted by Izabella Kaminska on Feb 02 09:12. Comment.We missed this when it first came out in December — but ETF Securities, the ever innovative exchange-traded fund provider behind many pioneering steps across the ETF-product spectrum — has come out with something called a ‘third generation ETF platform’. More…
Is Barclays due a pre-Xmas downgrade?
Posted by Paul Murphy on Dec 15 21:37. Comment.We only ask because Roger Freeman, BarCap’s IB-watcher in New York has taken a decidedly un-festive knife to his final quarter predictions for BarCap’s two key rivals, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. More…
Unreformed: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley
Posted by Paul Murphy on Nov 12 19:58. Comment.There’s bound to be an element of pots and kettles here, but Jonathan Glionna, a credit analyst at BarCap in New York, is not at all impressed by the efforts of his closes rivals to rein in leverage and stop using too much short-term funding. More…
The quant disruption that never was
Posted by Izabella Kaminska on Nov 11 10:18. Comment.We’re coming to this a little late, but the content of a November 3 Barclays Capital quant report is so intriguing we thought it still worth posting.
To cut to the chase, Matthew Rothman, of BarCap’s US equity quantitative strategy team, More…
More evidence speculators are not to blame for commodity moves
Posted by Izabella Kaminska on Oct 28 15:45. Comment.Barclays Capital does a nice job of assessing the latest back-dated release from the CFTC on commodity index trader positions in the CBOT corn market.
The CFTC statistics, released on October 20, present disaggregated positions of swap dealers and managed money going back to 2006. More…
B(e)arCap
Posted by Paul Murphy on Oct 26 18:28. Comment.Strategists at Barclays Capital have been hinting for weeks that they were growing wary of the house’s hardline bullish view on equities.
While BarCap’s strategists have yet to issue an outright “sell,” More…
Carbon indicators
Posted by Izabella Kaminska on Oct 09 10:42. Comment.There are three important industrial scenarios for Europe’s carbon allowance market – or EUA – investors across the spectrum should be aware of:
1) A rising industrial output scenario — good for the economy; More…
Gold off the charts and heading to $1,500 says BarCap
Posted by Neil Hume on Oct 07 10:43. Comment.Yep, that’s right $1,500 an ounce — although we must confess we don’t fully understand why.
See if you can make sense of Wednesday’s call from the Global Commodity Technical Strategy team at BarCap: More…
The end could come before the turn of the year
Posted by Neil Hume on Sep 25 13:03. Comment.What’s this? A Barclays Capital analyst who is something other than ultra bullish?
Yep.
And it’s not just any BarCap analyst but the Head of Research — Larry Kantor.
In a foreword to BarCap’s latest Global Outlook (titled: More…
Chinese commod crisis over; OECD to rescue
Posted by Paul Murphy on Sep 24 20:10. Comment.Earlier in the week, commodities analysts at BarCap were rather bewildered by data showing the Chinese are now importing substantially small quantities of wheat and soya and copper?
Well, the BarCap analysts have now got it together. More…
Tim Bond reckons the real risk is on the upside
Posted by Paul Murphy on Sep 24 16:40. Comment.Having generally called both equity and credit markets 100 per cent right over recent months, Barclays Capital’s head of global asset allocation is now rubbing salt into the wounds of those who failed to believe (including the beleaguered H&M Capital Management). More…
Burning of the Quants, redux
Posted by Paul Murphy on Sep 21 22:40. Comment.Remember the summer of 2007, and the onset of the Credit Crunch, when all the equity quantitative strategies fell over?
Well, it appears to be happening again.
Note the equity quant report from Matthew Rothman, More…
Weekend catch-up
Posted by Gwen Robinson on Jul 27 04:41. Comment.In case you missed these stories:
Goldman may join CIT rescue
Goldman Sachs is considering joining an effort to rescue ailing US lender CIT. Goldman has exposure of at least $250m in CIT debt and is a holder of a big portion of the $1bn in CIT notes due next month. More…
Jenkins to leave Barclays
Posted by Paul Murphy on Jul 20 05:45. Comment.Roger Jenkins, the structured finance and tax avoidance specialist at Barclays Capital, is to leave the bank. The Sunday Telegraph said he plans to set up an advisory business that will work with sovereign wealth funds and other cash-rich institutions on takeover deals and other corporate activity. More…
Bond: ‘History is bunk’
Posted by Paul Murphy on Jul 09 16:48. Comment.From Tim Bond, BarCap’s thoughtful head of global asset allocation (and an incurable bull, by the looks of things):
Existing data confirms that a sharp improvement in the US labour market is due over the next three months. More…