Among the winners in AT&T’s $48.5 billion bid to purchase satellite television provider DirecTV are some the banks handling the deal, which are in line to collect hundreds of millions in fees (paywall) and earn bragging rights among their rivals. (If, of course, the deal gets done.)
Across global Wall Street, the once-mighty bond-trading business is shrinking. Facing regulatory scrutiny, banks have jettisoned formerly profitable commodities trading businesses. And the beating heart of the banking business—investment banking—has been, basically, pronounced dead, by none other than Morgan Stanley’s chief executive James Gorman.
(Updated May 19, 8:01pm ET)
Coatue Management: This is the hedge fund that just wooed Goldman Sachs’ star technology banker Anthony Noto. The New York-based fund may not be as well known as, say, John Paulson’s eponymous Paulson & Co, but it’s a known quantity in Silicon Valley circles. Here’s what you need to know about Noto’s new employer.
So long, Noto. One of the main drivers in Goldman Sachs’ IPO machinery, tech banker Anthony Noto, just walked out the door, the Financial Times reports. Noto will leave banking to join hedge fund Coatue Management, which has offices in New York and Menlo Park, California.
Billionaire Wilbur Ross has launched a special investment vehicle, which had been popular just before the financial crisis gripped the markets, to make opportunistic acquisitions. The prominent investor, who carved out a reputation restructuring troubled companies in the ’80s and ’90s and then launched his own private equity firm 14 years ago, has submitted a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission to form a so-called special purpose acquisition corporation (or SPAC). The deal marks Ross’s first SPAC, sources familiar with the matter say.
Headphones are wearables. That simple fact puts Apple’s reported $3.2 billion deal for Beats Electronics in a whole different light.
News of a pending $3.2-billion deal (paywall) to sell the Beats Electronics company to Apple may be nuthin’ but a G thang for the company’s co-founder, Dr. Dre. But a billionaire thang? Maybe not yet.
Aaron Levie‘s Box may have scored a much-needed boost ahead of its planned $250 million stock offering. The cloud-storage company inked an agreement with General Electric to provide online-file-storage services to the industrial giant’s roughly 300,000 employees.
Barclays just gave its clearest signal yet that traditional investment banking is dying.
If you can’t beat them, hire them. That’s the strategy of JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon.
The past may haunt Alibaba’s hotly awaited stock offering.
It feels like only a few weeks ago that Box Inc. was whizzing toward a flashy IPO. In fact, it was.
Some of the world’s biggest commodities traders are buying up key pieces of the infrastructure that’s driving the US energy production boom.
Box’s IPO should arrive around Memorial Day.
Don’t expect the e-commerce giant Alibaba’s much-ballyhooed initial public offering to be a blockbuster deal at first, at least from a pure valuation standpoint.
Barclays is bidding adieu to the public face of its investment banking business.
Bank stress tests are supposed to offer a shot of confidence in the financial sector.
A new report shows that Americans are less and less likely to be able to walk to a branch of their banks. Large financial institutions in the first quarter of this year continued to deemphasize bank branches, in light of customers increasingly relying instead on their smart phones and online banking for transactions, and using cash less.
Wall Street’s traders used to mint money. Not any more. Trading revenues are falling and many big banks are mounting an ignominious retreat from the once-lucrative business of trading stocks, bonds, commodities and funky derivatives. America’s big five—JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley—reported $21.6 billion in total trading revenue during the first quarter of 2014. That’s down 10% from the prior year, and 41% from the all-time peak of $36.7 billion reached in 2009. (That’s when panicky investors pushed up trading volumes—which generate fees for banks.)
So much for belt-tightening at Barclays. After the bank told investors two years ago that it would keep excessive pay in check, its chairman, David Walker, appeared before angry shareholders at the bank’s annual meeting to explain why it went back on its word.
Peer-to-peer lenders may be in for boom times. The type of social-driven lending that helped fund flashy startups such as virtual-reality goggles maker Oculus VR could more than double over the next few years, according to research from the Tabb Group. Oculus was scooped up by Facebook for a cool $2 billion less than a month ago after receiving its original funding through the crowd-funding company Kickstarter. Tabb, in a recent report, estimates that the crowdsourcing market could hit around $17 billion globally by 2015, with more than 1,000 funding organizations formed to raise money. That would represent an eye-popping 200% increase in crowd-funding and an 88% increase in the number of lending venues throughout the world, Tabb says: Angel investors (mostly so-called “accredited,” high-net-worth folks who pass a set of financial thresholds) will provide some of the crowd-sourced funding and, across all funding paths, as much as $50 billion in financing in 2015, up from $22.9 billion in 2012. A more conservative growth estimate puts 2015 angel investments at $28 billion in 2015.
Hot commodity? More like a hot potato. The world’s biggest banks have been dropping their commodities businesses like that aforementioned tuber of late, selling off all or parts of their once-lucrative commodities trading units.
Whether or not we are in the midst of a tech IPO bubble right now, the first three months of the year have been the busiest for initial public offerings since 2011. During the first quarter, IPOs raising $10.6 billion hit the market, up 39% from the same period last year.
