eFinancialCareers

Until now, senior equity capital markets bankers have been largely spared annihilation. But with IPOs unlikely to recover any time soon, ECM teams are moving dangerously close to the killing zone. According to research firm Dealogic, withdrawn IPOs hit a record high of $13.1bn globally last month. Nor did preceding months provide much cheer – figures from Thomson Reuters suggest Europe is in the midst of the biggest IPO drought... Read more

Equity markets may be plummeting, but equity businesses are actually doing surprisingly well. Even more surprisingly, there appears to be some hiring going on. Q3 releases illustrate this strange resilience. Morgan Stanley, for example, saw equities sales and trading revenues leap from $6,572m in the first nine months of 2007 to $8,241m in the first nine months of 2008. Merrill Lynch, still bleeding in fixed income, saw its equity markets... Read more

First they had to tolerate the arrival of 2,500 Lehman bankers on inflated guarantees. Now Nomura’s existing staff are being asked to take orders from their uninvited guests. On Friday, Nomura revealed that ex-Lehmanites Christian Meissner and William Vereker are to be heads of investment banking for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and that Glenn Schiffman will head Asia-Pacific investment banking, based in Hong Kong. The appointments are said to be... Read more

More colour is emerging on the nature of the package being offered by Nomura to Lehman staff in London – and it looks very generous indeed. According to a totally anonymous (and possibly spurious) commentator on an earlier article, senior Lehman staff moving across to the Japanese bank are being offered two-year guaranteed bonuses based on the packages they received in 2007. Headhunters give credence to the rumours. Bonuses for 2008... Read more

Surprise news - several headhunters suggest some of Dresdner Kleinwort's bankers are actually quite high calibre. Many of them may even be employable elsewhere. This is handy as Commerzbank’s apparently planning to dump 1,000 of them. Then again, headhunters may be lying. According to The Times, prop traders and equities staff are top of the list for the chop at Dresdner Kleinwort. Finextra is predicting IT and back-office staff will... Read more

There’s hope for the army of former bankers who are occupied with little more than topping up their tans: the likes of ICAP and Tradition are hiring. In stark contrast to the pain inflicted on investment banking shareholders, ICAP’s shares rose nearly 20% last week after it predicted double digit revenue growth and said the interdealer broking (IDB) industry will “continue to display strong structural growth” of around 10%... Read more

There were lots more redundancies last week. Everyone from managing directors (Morgan Stanley) to associates (UBS) felt the steel. Bear Stearns continued to feel the pain of integration with JPMorgan. Reuters said JP has made job offers to only 6,000 of Bear’s 14,000 staff. Dealbreaker said they were being offered less than they got at Bear. JPMorgan was also said to be closing or spinning off most of Bear’s... Read more

It’s down to regulators to reform the bonus system. And given regulators are powerless to intervene, reform looks as likely as a small village in Hampshire becoming the financial centre of the UK. Regulators are certainly making scary noises. From Mervyn King’s anti-bonus diatribe, to Sir Callum McCarthy’s call for banks to emphasise long-term performance, snarls and grunts about bonuses have been emanating from the regulatory corner for several months.... Read more

It was a good week for hedge funds – unless you were GLG. Banks were still busily lopping staff, although there were rays of hiring in commodities and – strangely enough – leveraged finance. Hedge funds provided reasons to be cheerful. Hedge Fund Research predicted investors plan to pour $200bn into hedge funds this year. ICAP launched an African hedge fund. It emerged that the replica hedge funds... Read more

At the risk of being eviscerated and dunked in a vat of scalding Asti Spumante (now that Bollinger’s out of reach), it’s time to say the unthinkable: bankers who find themselves suddenly unable to service enormous mortgage payments have only themselves to blame. The Times last week produced an anecdotal portrait of a new phenomenon – the ‘poor banker’ with a £700k interest-only mortgage acquired in the go-go year of... Read more

Does BNP know what it’s getting into in the badlands of New York? Last week it emerged that the French bank is in ‘advanced talks’ to acquire Bank of America’s US prime brokerage business – not exactly the most sought-after asset in the world, given all other banks dropped out of the bidding process – but an acquisition that would strengthen BNP’s US investment banking franchise if it goes ahead.... Read more

With UBS likely to announce sweeping job cuts over the next few weeks, staff at the bank are said to be feeling understandably anxious. “People at UBS are very nervous,” says one structured credit headhunter. “The feeling is that at worst they will get axed, and that at best they’ll be paid atrociously this year.” Structured credit and fixed income teams at UBS are likely to bear the brunt of any... Read more

The latest salary survey from search firm Napier Scott suggests Asian MDs now earn more than anyone else. And equity derivatives pay better than credit. Napier Scott’s 2008 salary and bonus survey suggests managing directors working on exotic credit trading desks at tier one banks in Asia commanded average total compensation of £1.5m (US$3.0m) for 2007. This was 45% more than their counterparts in the UK, and 117% more than the relatively... Read more

Equity derivatives might be tipped to shore up cash-strapped investment banks, but professionals in the space shouldn’t expect explosive recruitment. With investment banks’ appetite for credit derivatives fading fast, equity derivatives have been touted as an area that could offer a glimmer of hope. Adrien Valenzuela, head of equity derivatives investor sales at JPMorgan, told Financial News that credit investors are turning their attention to equities: “They began looking at... Read more

They’re cheap, but trainees on ‘rotation’ are engaged in a game of musical chairs. And that’s not a great situation to be in right now. Back in November 2006, students at universities and business schools had reason to feel lucky. Yes, there were 60 analyst applicants for every place (according to High Fliers Research), but banks were busily hiring for record analyst and associate intakes for the following year. Fast forward... Read more

No longer the pariahs of the banking job market, equity researchers are hot property again. Many of them even got higher bonuses. Financial News reports that ‘entire teams’ of researchers are being pinched for commodities equity research positions, and that Collins Stewart is hiring for equities research sales and trading. Recruiters say Macquarie is also persisting with its equities push, which is expected to see it amass 35 researchers... Read more