Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast 032

Transcript ICE masterclass call fails to sway box bound investors, France ever eager to get more CCP from London. No Connect linkage for Alibaba stock and CME results disappoint. Also news of the NCDEX IPO and more!    Welcome to the Exchange Invest podcast with me Patrick L Young. It's all the bourse news that's fit to pth.   Having enjoyed the speed of Concorde in the same direction way back when, it was quite the excitement to see storm Ciara helping record breakers across the Atlantic this past weekend. A British Airways jet managed a record breaking four hour 56 minute trip from JFK to Heathrow (Concorde averaged three and a half hours) for the same trip but with de facto Economy Class legroom for all. Presumably there was a slightly more agreeable meal to be had in the premium classes on the 747 which belted along at its top speed of 825 miles an hour, thanks to a 265 mile per hour tailwind. By comparison, that tailwind alone was more than 2.5 times the top speed of the Vickers Vimy used by Alcock and  Brian for the first transatlantic flight in June 1919, involving 16 hours of flying over the shorter distance from Lester fields St. John's Newfoundland to Clifton county Galway.    Indeed, several people were flying into their own adverse storms this week, no tailwinds to be found. CME earnings were the biggest of the pile as their leader of the pack status would suggest. Their earnings nonetheless, were lagging estimates in Q4 and were going to drop year on year lower trading activity walls to blame. Well the thing is with CME a silo-gistic trade processing Titan, there's no pivot when markets are calmer, giving it a high correlation to volatility.   At the same time ASX results, they posted a 250 million Australian dollar profit after tax. They're trying to build ‘the exchange of the future’ and making much of Digital Asset in which they invested some more money recently and which is building their new blockchain CSD.   Tradeweb they had numbers as well: they beat estimates by one cent. And CBOE, they managed well: the profits of parsimony. They helped keep CBOE above analyst expectations while posting disappointing results for growth mavens .TMX Group's results were, well, I suppose the most exciting thing was there was no sign of Lou Eccleston after his voluntary retirement, which of course was not linked to any shenanigans at Pravda-Berg his previous employer. Meanwhile, Euronext, they had the first numbers to come in with input from the Oslo bourse which they acquired during the course of the last year. But unfortunately Dubai Financial Markets saw a profit and revenue decline for the whole of 2019.    And that brings us ladies and gentlemen to the Intercontinental Exchange, who had an epic earnings call even by their own high quality standards last week, just as this podcast was being recorded. Overall, a great set of results 9% increase in the quarterly dividend, another set of record breaking revenues and profits.It was a good result and a  remarkable call: a must listen. At the same time, there were problems of course in relation to what might be called investor myopia. As we know last week, as was discussed in podcast 31. The news leaked out that there was some sort of a discussion ongoing between eBay and ICE. Although at the time of the leak, it seemed as if discussions had drawn to a conclusion. To put it mildly, analysts and investors were, frankly, very, very skeptical about the possibility of a tie up. If nothing else, it's a very interesting lesson in the modern ultra low latency edge of how once a leak can get out, it can spiral out of control. Ultimately...