HSBC may move to Hong Kong and the financial world as we know it will come to an end. Or not. Yesterday it became apparent that in headcount terms at least, the hype over the possible migration of HSBC’s HQ has been overdone.
If HSBC decides to ‘redomicile’ outside the UK, the bank says just 250 of its 48,000 UK-based jobs will be affected. That’s not many: in 2012, UBS lost many more London-based markets professionals before lunchtime. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that HSBC’s salespeople and traders have nothing to fear. After avowing the irrelevance of the HQ move yesterday, HSBC’s CEO Stuart Gulliver also said that the bank is thinking of ‘moving some of the GBM [Global Banking and Markets] activities outside the UK.” It’s not clear what these activities would be, nor where they might move to. All will become clear at HSBC’s strategy day on June 9th.
Separately, pity the bank that hires in an army of super-intelligent 24 year-olds. Keeping hold of them is about as easy as predicting the outcome of the UK election. The Wall Street Journal says the average tenure of 20-24 year-olds is just 16 months. Banks that can keep their first year analysts for two years are in with a chance of retaining them through to associate level and beyond. – Once an employee hits 24, average tenure rises to three years.
Meanwhile:
HSBC is planning to announce cuts to its investment bank on June 9th. (Financial Times)
China’s Haitong Securities plans to hire hundreds of bankers across Europe. It wants to build an EMEA M&A team, along with an asset management business and a Renminbi trading operation. (Financial Times)
Credit Suisse has almost 2½ times the risk-weighted assets and equity in its core investment bank as UBS but in the first quarter produced not quite 1½ times the pretax profits. (WSJ)
Meet he 25 richest hedge fund managers of 2014, each of whom generated more than $175m ‘for themselves’. (Institutional Investor)
Most of this hedge fund ‘pay’ is just return on investment. (BloombergView)
Deutsche is expanding its Chinese equities business. (Finance Asia)
Bond trading platform, Trumid, has hired a lot of expensive ex-bank bond traders and needs revenues to flow soon. (Financial Times)
Crispen Odey had a bad April. (Twitter)
Rates traders aren’t having such a good time after all. (Twitter)
Why you don’t want to rent in Woking. (Telegraph)
How not to tender your resignation: “I don’t think you guys are intellectually capable enough to have any sensible discussion anymore.” (Gadgets)