"If you believe in the prospects of the region, then working for a local bank has increasingly become a better option now than being employed by a large
bulge-bracket firm," said a Dubai-based banker who resigned from a global bank last year.
They, like every other
bulge-bracket firm, survived the fall of 2008 by the grace of the United States federal government and its willingness to support faltering financial institutions.
This measure is aimed at getting a foothold for a competitive securities company to be a
bulge-bracket firm in line with the enforcement of the Financial Investment Services and Capital Market Act.
Also, are the apparent conflicts of a
bulge-bracket firm simply too difficult for a fiduciary to ignore?
Nobody looks any differently at the CEO of a major
bulge-bracket firm if they're having problems in the muni business.
Another former director at a
bulge-bracket firm in London noted that a ban on prop trading could affect the buy-side's working relationships with sell-side counterparts.
Last year some of the leading
bulge-bracket firms combined their equities sales/voice broking and equities electronic trading divisions.
It's the way fiduciaries, institutions,
bulge-bracket firms (the most elite investment banks) and wealthy individuals that are determined to stay wealthy invest.
While acting as co-manager on these offerings, Williams Capital was able to sell bonds to a whole group of money managers and other institutional investors to whom the
bulge-bracket firms had paid scant attention.
Summary paragraph: A new business model has been established to let banks and brokers compete on a par with
bulge-bracket firms in the fragmented equity execution space - outsourcing could prove the solution, says Alessandro Bressan, director, equities electronic trading at Deutsche Bank.
McPartland says that because a completely virtualised and highly utilised infrastructure is still years away for sell-side equities technology - 80 per cent of the
bulge-bracket firms are using server virtualisation but its use for trading applications is unlikely due to the latency penalty - a large gap exists between what is currently possible and actually done.
After raking in more than $2.5 billion in new bond issues in his first 18 months in business, the entrepreneur found himself struggling to survive in a market that forced even many
bulge-bracket firms out of the bond business.