TRANSCRIPT
This week in the parish of bourses and market structure. From the great nation that brought us rousseau and Sartre: “ is it a buy or is it a sale?” A philosophical dispute, afflicts Euronext middleware. After the joy of NASDAQ, a week of gloom, until ICE raised the profitable mood. Meanwhile, the world's largest Ant is heading for a slew of records in the public markets.
My name is Patrick L. Young. Welcome to the bourse business, weekly digest. It's the Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast.
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, this is a very brief reduction of highlights amongst the key headlines from the weekend market structure. All the analysis of the weeks, many events and happenings can be found in the Exchange Invest Daily subscriber newsletter: The unique guide to the bourse business, sent daily to your inbox. More details at ExchangeInvest.com ...and finally a word. On behalf of the echo. Thank you very much for the fact that I've got some temporary premises this week in the midst of a very, very frantic week of engagement. We're coming to you live from a wonderful ballroom in the center of Valletta.
Over in Bigworld, the 0816 intercity express trend from Lockdown Central to Temporary Desk is now arriving at platform two (Just beside the printer)... In other words, in BigWorld this week, model railway brand Hornby have returned to profit on a lockdown boom.
When it comes to Euronext, “Is it a buy, is it a sale? Oh man, this is way too complex”. That was the headline. We appended to a Uranus story of the week. The Financial Times’ Phil Stafford rightly tweeted that it was one of the strangest exchange communications he'd ever seen, which I think was putting it very, very diplomatically. Indeed.
Essentially the Euronext exchange had a bit of a data handling error. They couldn't tell “buy” from “sell.” It strikes me that could be regarded as the most fundamentally blatant failing of an exchange to do its core function.
That might be getting a bit closer to the descriptive mark compared to Phil Stafford's diplomatic comments, as in define an exchange? Well, I would define it as “we match buyers and sellers as a neutral venue.” Therefore, we could define Euronext on the past week's evidence as “we're a user neutral, lucky dip, where we will execute trades based around your orders, but we reserve the right to randomly deliver buys as sales and vice versa all with the gallic trademark shrug...because middleware.”
Indeed given the fact that previously in the week I was discussing, “was it middle earth or middleware?” that was the problem of the shutdown at Euronext that triumphant acquisition of Borsa Italiana seems well. So very last year with this latest confirmation that discerning buy or sell is inherently tricky for one of Europe's leading stock exchange groups.
Anybody who ever dawned a yellow jacket on the old floor of say LIFFE, or MATIF in Paris - wherever they were in past decades, they can readily confirm the operational complexity, even during open outcry. I mean, it used to be two separate boxes, whole inches apart on a sheet of paper with one to be ticked, #stressfulbinary or what?
Luckily Euronext, not in Japan. Otherwise they would now be facing endless ritual humiliation for weeks on end. As a cheaper alternative to accelerate understanding of these somewhat conflicting, but interrelated terms of trade. I can recommend some former floor trading bosses who could come over to Paris and offer “hairdryer” management until Euronext c...
