Less than twenty years ago, a trading jacket and a badge was all you need to trade at the option market. During the open outcry era, youngsters fresh from secondary school showed up in the pit.
Some did remarkable well without a university degree. They started on the trading floor aged 18. For instance, there’s this succesful hedgie, the recruiter and the husband-of-a-celebrity.
It has been a modest-kept secret for some time. Remco Lenterman will join the London office of Citadel. As soon as he is ready tending his garden (when non-compete expires).
He left IMC back in August 2015. Earlier he worked for Kempen & Co and of course Goldman Sachs. He started for GS somewhere in the eighties. Long time ago, different world. Lenterman is outspoken in a secretive industry. Very active on twitter (@), where he is one of the few reasonable defenders of HFT. Usually poking fun at Hunsader.
Remco Lenterman politely declined to comment on the matter. But he will remain active on Twitter. Citadel has been recruiting aggressively for their London office. In October 2015 Citadel hired Brian Oliver, coming from JP Morgan. Lenterman will start in August 2016.
The current markets make trading amazing. I predict the first quarter results of KCG, Virtu and Flow Traders will be spectacular. Shares of Optiver changed hands for €2000 – up from €1600 in 2015.
“Our firm is made for this kind of market”, said CEO Doug Cifu after the August 24 stock rout. And regretted his remark immediately. Investors can’t stand it when a HFT CEO is trumpeting how much money they made, when regular investors lose. Anyway, this year that kind of market has been going on for weeks.
Enough to talk about. How convenient, the FOW Amsterdam event is coming up shortly. On March 10th, to be specific. Just like last year the location is Amsterdam Hilton. After a long day of interesting discussions, there will be an equally interesting gala diner and drinks.
See here for the list of speakers and topics. There are interesting speakers I’m looking forward to hear. Attendants will be folks from every relevant firm in the business. FOW made a list of firms sending delegates to last year’s edition. I hope the company names on the name badges will be without those errors.
There have been a lot of interesting job transfers involving trading firms IMC, Optiver and DRW. Looks a bit like the football transfer window – a lot of movement in January. The Premier League transfers will receive enough attention already. In contrast to the football pitch, most traders remain loyal for many years. Here are January’s most eye-catching transfers in trading world.
One curious transfer made the head of DRW‘s London office, Steven Hamilton. He moved to London Stock Exchange’ fixed income platform, CurveGlobal. DRW is one of the major traders in fixed income derivative market. Steven Hamilton will be part of the business development team, responsible for prop traders and market makers.
CurveGlobal isn’t a household name, yet. CurveGlobal is a venture by the LSE with six major dealer banks and the CBOE. It aims to fight the duopoly that Deutsche Boerse and ICE have in Bund, Bobl, Schatz and Gilts futures. Expected to go live in second quarter of this year. Press release from October 2015, and more colour on this on Bloomberg by John Detrixhe.
DeGiro secretly charged customers for transactions at foreign exchanges. There’s a line in the fee schedule nobody ever heard about. It says “Setting up trade possibilities” (pdf). This means doing transactions at an exchange abroad comes at a small extra cost.
Once you do a transaction at a foreign exchange, you will be charged a fixed fee per additional exchange. No matter how many trades you do. The English customers have this fee curbed at 0,25% – but this isn’t the case for Dutch investors. Very recently the cap has been removed.
