Exchange Invest Weekly 022

Transcript The rain in Spain. Well, who cares frankly, it's the bid for the horse that’s what interests us in this week's Exchange Invest Weekly   Welcome to another Exchange Invest Weekly. My name is Patrick L. Young, the founder and indeed publisher of the Exchange Invest Daily, the newsletter of the bourse business, and we have a battle for the bourse this weekend: BME the Spanish Stock Exchange which operates all of the exchanges in Spain, including derivatives and also of course the CSD clearing depository and clearing house; they are under a pretty staggering bid actually, Swiss exchange group has made an all cash 2.8 billion euros bid for the beleaguered BME, as it truly is. As we were racing to pixel on Monday the stock had already reached the 34 euro offer price that was some gosh 30+% different to where it had closed as we recording this podcast last Friday. Euronext have been left behind instantaneously, they need to pony up according to the BME if they're going to get into the battle. And indeed who knows it could be a battle royal because of course, that would give the opportunity for Stephane Boujnah’s empire to unify its way all the way from Portugal, right up to through the lowlands and then also its outer points of course in Ireland and Norway. The battle is very, very interesting indeed. Jos Dijsselhof used to run Euronext Amsterdam. He clearly has a very exciting plan going forward for the bourse. It might not even involve delisting the BME stock itself. That sounds very interesting Could it be they're looking at some sort of an interesting vehicle for the SiX group to go forward and make acquisitions in the future, given the fact that of course, the SiX group are not going to be listing in the near future, because of the, well, historically interesting position of the mass duopoly of Credit Suisse and UBS, as well as the many other banks who are held delicately in a state of well diplomatic status through the current ownership of the SiX group. Nonetheless, SiX looking dynamic, Dijsselhof looking dynamic, and of course, only barely days after he said there were no conversations going on about acquiring the BME. Stephane Boujnah,  Euronext looking pretty flat footed. This is going to be an interesting development moving on from the Antonio Zoho era because of course, he stepped down several months ago. Other bidders are in the fray potentially Deutsche Boerse, mentioned for this one. It's interesting to see that UBS analysts, Commerzbank analysts and others can't perceive that there's any value to DB1 buying the BME they can't understand how BME; their sale rating could be turned around by the Deutsche Boerse management through restructuring... or perhaps that's a telling insight, how even analysts view the management direction of the DB1 C suite nowadays.   I'm not sure that it makes sense for Hong Kong exchanges to be involved the Hispano-Sino- Hong Kong relations don't strike me as immediately logical, but clearly HKEX could have the money if they want said European operations within one country, but it hardly delivers the sensational transpacific pact, which was the incredible pivot that could have been delivered if the London Stock Exchange had been listening, instead of making eyes only towards Refinitiv. Incidentally, coming up next week: We have the exciting vote on Refinitiv: will the LSE shareholders old jump in and decide to vote for what is going to be the worst restructuring project in the history of the entire parish in the near future? Well, coming back to the SiX and BME issue, very, very interesting deal all together. Any counter offer, as I mentioned at the start of the segment, for Spanish Stock Exchange would have to top the SiX bid, the BME has stated and that's obviously going to mean that a lot of people are going to be spending the weekend...