060 Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast August 27th

Transcript  This week in the parish of bourses and market structure:  New Zealand Exchange crippled by DDoS attacks.  Many bids for MTS.  NASDAQ goes DPO. Ant Financial seeks a record breaking IPO. ...And there's the curious case of the stock exchange with a hundred percent uptime, thanks to ensuring the regulator reduces the amount of business they can actually trade. I know that feels like a tale from Kafka-Bourse.  My name is Patrick L. Young. Welcome to the bourse business weekly digest. It's the Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast.  The New Zealand Exchange is under siege. As I record this podcast, DDoS attacks have crippled the exchange three days this week alone. I've total sympathy for NZX. DDoSs used to plague the Dublin based GSX transports of which I was originally a founder and they remain an issue for exchanges using public networks. At the same time that the hackers have resorted to attacking New Zealand Exchange would imply that they are seeing a lot of structural integrity in larger markets which has left them attempting to attack a more modestly sized national market than the many larger entities... the New Zealand exchanges, small, but rather perfectly formed bores. Over at the top of the pyramid. Interesting to update what's been going on there. They're interesting times at the head of the field as the top tier of the pyramid has tightened up remarkably where once there was a differential getting owned for $20 billion between CME and ICE, the latter's momentum is easing the difference to the becalmed and arguably on the cusp of crisis CME. ICE blasted through the hundred dollar a share barrier in recent days, post the Ellie Mae acquisition. And it's now sitting on a market cap of $56.71 billion while CME is ahead by some $6 billion at 62.85 billion, having squeaked up in the current U S bull market run and just nudged past Hong Kong Exchanges in recent days, which sits at a still remarkable 62.3 billion. CME may be back on top of the pyramid, but it looks like a Pyrrhic victory as HKEX gears up for perhaps the biggest IPO in history and as ICE integrates its single largest acquisition. Meanwhile, CME is reliant on NASDAQ's boffins to find new products to license.  Speaking of NASDAQ, they have filed with the SEC and the USA for IPO alternatives, namely DPO: Direct Public Offerings. They're filing their rule modifications, catching up with the New York Stock Exchange who did so in June with a view to disintermediating investment banks and the other rather one might say in the current digital age, greedy troffers, who have for far too long overcharged to enable access into public markets. There was no point to underwriting 20 years ago for an issue, as "Capital Market Revolution!" noted. And the idea that you pay something like 7% to a morass of intermediaries makes a mockery of all the work done by electronic bourses to keep costs at wafer slim prices. Of course, if the investment banks were sensible, they would stop bickering about data and work out how to retain their position in the IPO chain. Instead, their greed is destroying it. Meanwhile NASDAQ is  getting their rule changes go...