Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast 025

Transcript  One little Clearinghouse goes to market. One small interest rate platform gets re-funded. Welcome to the Exchange Invest Weekly with me Patrick L Young   This week in the bourse business, CBOE, formerly the Chicago Board Options Exchange (now calling themselves Global Markets although they really sort of transatlantic markets, but anyway…) their European arm has agreed to acquire the European equities Clearinghouse Euro CCP. Was this an aggressive bid or was it simply the opportunity to rescue something that was at death's door? Certainly given the fact that Euronext seem to have taken a significant mark down on the sale of their stake, which they've only had for a couple of years, it looks as if it was somewhat of the latter... CBOE get to secure the clearing franchise for their equities trading, which must be quite useful within the European marketplace, although a few analysts were getting rather overwrought with the concept that this would somehow rather allow them to jump easily and expeditiously into the world of clearing equity options and derivatives. In the small step for mankind, this is definitely a giant leap altogether. At the same time. Interesting to note, David Howson, the incoming CEO was quoted on the press releases with no mention of outgoing CEO Mark Hemsley, who's clearly already left the building, attained unperson starters, or at least retired. Full points there to Sam Agini of Financial News, he was the man who brought us the news of this little deal as a scoop via his excellent columns.    Meanwhile, elsewhere in deals Curve Global, ‘the little interest rate platform that can’ continues to be growing, innovating, building momentum, and indeed has got another $20 million in funding to match the 20 million it got last year. Actually, I digress. It was 20 million pounds and funding even better given the fact to the strength of the pound during the course of the last day or so, as this podcast was going to pixel on the basis that indeed, the Brexit deal seems to be assured and therefore the pound was roaring thanks to the reelection of the Boris Johnson government with a stonking majority. However, back to Curve Global: interesting platform. They have produced a credible product base. It's still far from mature, but it's building its niche and endeavoring to do the right thing serving clients. It's a good thing it helps keeping the market competitive for clients all around. And it'll be interesting to see how they fare during the course of 2021. When of course, I-bors are supposed to be dying, nobody is quite sure what shape the new Pokemon of interest rates will be. Meanwhile, over at Refinitiv which is of course in the process of being acquired by the parent group of Curve Global none other than the London Stock Exchange Group, representatives are looking to slash the costs on their borrowing.   They've got US dollar 6.45 billion of loans. Just after the record buyout. It's actually only one year of Well, it's very simple: it's effectively a balance sheet arb but given the LSE is in a rather healthy financial position overall investors are basically much more relaxed and therefore willing to pay a lower coupon for. As one investor put it, and I quote,   “Investors view Refinitiv as a much better credit given the announcement from the LSE. A lot of the concerns around the financing from Blackstone have settled too. The concerns are not the business, but the loan documents, sponsor risk and high leverage.”   In other news about Refinitiv, the South China Morning Post broke the news that actually Refinitiv apparently have filters on the desktop, which keeps Hong Kong unrest news away from mainland...