Murray Roos is a big name in equities trading. As co-head of equities at Citigroup, he’s overseen an expansion of the division that resulted in various senior management shake-ups and a near constant trickle of new hires throughout 2016 and into this year.
Citi said in its investor day presentation during the summer that it still had aspirations to become a top five player in equities (right now it’s ranked seventh globally), and is attempting to contend with the likes of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan who head up the equities league tables. Roos, along with his co-head, Dan Keegan, has been responsible for Citi’s equities buildout, which is no mean feat when most banks have been culling their equities desks and when Citi has traditionally focused more on fixed income.
In an interview with Financial News, Roos says there’s still room to grow: “We’ve seen an increase in revenue where the rest of the Street is seeing a decrease. But we haven’t quite seen that massive step change in revenue,” he said.
Senior traders increasingly complain of investment banks being “less fun” places to, Roos says “I’m enjoying my job as much as ever. And I’ve been in the equity business in a much lower regulated environment.” But maybe his comparison points are a little skewed. Before he became a trader, Roos was a chemical engineer, working in a chemical plant. Something made him change his mind on the long-term viability of the job.
“I fell into a vat of anti-foaming agent and I had to get pulled out of that vat,” he told FN. “I was lying on the transom at two o’clock in the morning and decided that it was time to change careers.” Maybe a working highly-regulated environment in a job increasingly threatened by technological advances doesn’t seem so bad in retrospect.
Separately, it turns out that Brexit could be very bad indeed for London’s financial sector. While some brush off a few hundred traders being reluctantly shipped off to Frankfurt as a mere fleshwound for the City of London, Frankfurt – which has won the battle of the Brexit banking jobs – has other ideas. Felix Hufeld, president of German financial regulator, BaFin, said that the whole idea of moving a a few jobs to Germany while maintaining the majority of headcount in London just won’t cut it. London and the EU needs to “to transplant and split up their entire ecosystem established over the years — that means IT infrastructures, knowledge, processes and people”.
Meanwhile:
Leah Mallas is the new head of J.P. Morgan’s FX prime broking business (Financial News)
Citigroup is planning to hire 20 investment bankers in Saudi Arabia (Bloomberg)
Saudi is the place to be: HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche and Citi are all expanding (Bloomberg)
Carlyle co-founders David Rubenstein and William Conway are stepping aside to hand the day to day operation to the “younger” generation: long-serving exec Glenn Youngkin, 50, and deputy chief investment officer Kewsong Lee, 52. (Financial Times)
Laszlo Korsos, the chief data officer at Citadel who joined from Uber, has stepped down after just three months (Financial News)
Goldman Sachs is betting that MiFID II will mean more demand for mid-cap research coverage, and is bulking up (Bloomberg)
Kathy Elsesser is leading a team of bankers at Goldman Sachs investing in smaller companies (Reuters)
Georges Gedeon, a former Millennium Management PM, has launched his own firm, Antler Capital (HFM Week)
Odey Asset Management has lost nearly half of its assets under management (Financial Times)
Arnold Schwarzenegger – Lloyds Banking Group’s new problem (Bloomberg)
Contact for news, tips and comments: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com
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