Exchange Invest Weekly 017

Transcript A Deal! A dea!l My kingdom for a dea!l Finally ladies and gentlemen we've got it: One bourse and another... doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. Welcome to the Exchange Invest Weekly.   Well it was the best of times and the worst of times. In M&A-land we finally got a deal ladies and gentlemen. After lots of merger speculation, precisely none of which actually talked about the deal in question: the Berlin Boerse, that August institution most recently run by Jörg Walte and Arthur Fisher, who are both now going to be in the process of retiring their posts. Indeed Arthur was going to be retiring anyway.   The Boerse Berlin is being taken over in a curious deal. Tradegate with which it has always had a certain degree of relationship which is owned 75% by the Deutsche Boerse itself. So therefore Deutsche Boerse which owns Tradegate is ultimately acquiring the Berlin stock exchange a venue in recent years of all manner of interesting high speed trading and other platform driven marketplace operations. Good luck to all parties concerned, particularly the incoming erstwhile Tradegate CEO who's going to run the Boerse Berlin Oliver Szabries.    Of course, in other news, there was another deal that was being much discussed this week. In fact, we started the week with lots of people saying Hong Kong will sweeten the deal for the London Stock Exchange when it wasn't to be. Tuesday morning came and news reached us from Hong Kong, that Hong Kong had decided for various reasons to withdraw from going hostile. Is it the end of the hostile merger? Who knows? Certainly, it was an interesting and fascinating deal while it lasted. And indeed it may yet rise again. Of course, the Telegraph in its role as continuity London Stock Exchange advocate in chief interviewed Stephen Schwartzman at the weekend, which was quite interesting. He was certainly very aggressively defending the Blackstone side of the Refinitiv deal and it looks as if well, at least if nothing else, come November, maybe December, there's going to be a vote on the LSE Refinitiv. Shareholders seem to be increasingly restive though as concerns rise. Just how capable is the London Stock Exchange of integrating the un-integratable: the good folks of formerly  Reuters, formerly Thompson, formerly Thomson Reuters, formerly Refinitiv, none of whose management teams managed to get together with the behemoth and actually managed to run it as a modern digital configuration. Wonder what's going to happen in the future? It's going to be very, very interesting. Certainly, Hong Kong have dropped their bid, they cannot re-bid for another six months. I can't help but feel though that the London Stock Exchange if it actually acquires Refinitiv is going to end up looking a little bit like Graf Spee during the Battle of the River Plate in September 1939. As you may recall, the Graf Spee was hit by a series of other smaller British cruisers. At that point, in the South Atlantic, it suffered some remarkable damage to some degree through bad luck. It crawled into the harbor of Montevideo, where it was promptly informed it could only stay for 72 hours under the rules of the Uruguayan state being neutral. Thus, actually, when it was given the choice, the Graf Spee was stricken. It couldn't effectively defend itself and indeed, ultimately, it was scuttled by the captain. Now, no one's going to suggest that the LSE is going to scuttle itself. But I do feel with all of the interesting things that are coming ahead, particularly the likely reconciliation in some grand Vienna settlement fashion of the business of Euroclear that we're going to see, a huge number of opportunities that the LSE are going to be missing because they're all going to be below decks, in the engine rooms, try...