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Jeffrey Sprecher’s Improbable Path to Buying the N.Y.S.E.

January 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment

It was January 2000, and Mr. Sprecher had been cold-calling Wall Street for weeks. He was searching desperately for someone to back his small company in Atlanta, a business that was eating up his money and years of his life.

That’s when a black limousine pulled up in front of the bar, Jake’s Dilemma. The limo had been sent by the mighty Goldman Sachs to fetch Mr. Sprecher, and as he sank into the back seat that winter day, he set off on an improbable journey that has since taken him to the pinnacle of American finance.

Today Mr. Sprecher, a man virtually unknown outside of financial circles, is poised to buy the New York Stock Exchange. Not one of the 2,300 or so stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange (combined value of those shares: about $20.1 trillion). No, Jeff Sprecher is buying the entire New York Stock Exchange.

It sounds preposterous. A businessman from Atlanta blows into New York and walks off with the colonnaded high temple of American capitalism. But if all goes according to plan, his $8.2 billion acquisition, announced a few days before Christmas, will close later this year. And with that, 221 years of Wall Street history will come to an end. No more will New York be the master of the New York Stock Exchange. Instead, from its bland headquarters 750 miles from Wall Street, Mr. Sprecher’s young company, IntercontinentalExchange, will run the largest stock exchange in the nation and the world.

Mr. Sprecher, 57, certainly plays the role of a wily upstart. He may wear power suits and a Patek Philippe watch, but he comes across as unusually casual and self-deprecating for a man in his position. He pokes fun at himself for his shortcomings — “I don’t know how to manage people,” he says — and his love of obscure documentaries.

How the New York Stock Exchange fell into Mr. Sprecher’s hands is, at heart, a story of the disruptive power of innovation. ICE, as IntercontinentalExchange is known, did not even exist 13 years ago. It has no cavernous trading floor, no gilded halls, no sweaty brokers braying for money on the financial markets. What it has is technology.

Like many young companies that are upending the old order in business, ICE has used computer power to do things faster and cheaper, if not always better, than people can. Its rapid ascent reflects a new Wall Street where high-speed computers now dominate trading, sometimes with alarming consequences. New, electronic trading systems have greatly reduced the cost of buying and selling stocks, thus saving mutual funds — and, by extension, ordinary investors — countless millions. But they have also helped usher in a period of hair-raising volatility.

Mr. Sprecher (pronounced SPRECK-er) has probably done more than anyone else to dismantle the trading floors of old and replace human brokers with machines. Along the way, he and ICE have traced an arc through some of the defining business stories of our time — from the rise and fall of Enron, to the transformation of old-school investment banks into vast trading operations, to the Wall Street excesses that not long ago helped derail the entire economy. Now, after a series of bold acquisitions, he is about to become the big boss of the Big Board.

Does it really matter who owns the New York Stock Exchange and its parent company, NYSE Euronext? For most people, stock exchanges are probably a bit like plumbing. Most of us don’t think much about them — until something goes wrong. But lately, some things have gone spectacularly wrong.

One sign of trouble came in 2010, when an errant trade ricocheted through computer networks and touched off one of the most harrowing moments in stock market history. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged 900 points in a matter of minutes, and a new phrase entered the lexicon: flash crash.

Since then, flash crashes in individual stocks have been remarkably common, as the centuries-old system of central exchanges has given way to a field of competing electronic systems.

ICE wasn’t involved in any of these problems. In fact, it has been praised as one of the first exchanges to put limits on lightning-quick, high-frequency trading. This points to Mr. Sprecher’s deftness in piloting his company through periods of regulation, deregulation and now re-regulation.

While many banking executives have clashed with Washington, Mr. Sprecher has sensed the changing winds and tacked accordingly. He also stays close — some say too close — to the powerful Wall Street firms that are his customers.

It is perhaps unsurprising that some of the people who make their living on the Big Board’s floor are a bit nervous about the exchange’s new boss. But Mr. Sprecher says they have nothing to fear. His friends and business associates say he could actually turn out to be the best hope for restoring trust in the stock market. After all, he has beaten the odds before.

“There were a number of times when the odds were long, but he wasn’t deterred from stepping in,” says James Newsome, who was Mr. Sprecher’s regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission before becoming his competitor as chief executive of the New York Mercantile Exchange. “A lot of people, if they don’t think they will win, they won’t participate. Jeff doesn’t operate like that.”

For now, Mr. Sprecher is still spending much of his time at ICE’s headquarters in suburban Atlanta. The contrast with the New York Stock Exchange is striking. Behind its neoclassical face, the Big Board is a sprawling labyrinth of historic oil paintings, gilded leather chairs, stained wood and elegant dining rooms — all set amid crowds of gawking tourists.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/business/jeffrey-sprechers-improbable-path-to-buying-the-nyse.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

DealBook: Exchange Sale Reflects New Realities of Trading

December 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThe floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.

On a warm day in Boca Raton, Fla., the host of a reception for an annual financial conference was not a big bank or a powerful exchange as in years past, but a young firm based in Atlanta.

Guests who gathered at the oceanfront resort were surprised. They were greeted with bottled ice water that carried the company’s logo, and as they left, were invited to grab iPod Shuffles.

That event, some four years ago, was the Wall Street equivalent of a coming-out party for the firm, IntercontinentalExchange, or ICE, an electronic operator of markets for derivatives and commodities. Now, the markets upstart is announcing itself to a much larger world with an $8.2 billion deal to buy the symbolic cradle of American capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange.

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The takeover illustrates starkly how trading in commodities and derivatives has become much more lucrative than trading in the shares of companies. Warren E. Buffett warned in 2003 that the “derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle,” and that the genie, even after a global financial crisis, was not going back. Currently, derivatives — financial bets tied to underlying assets like oil prices or interest rates, among other things — are a $600 trillion market. Even the parent of the N.Y.S.E. attracted its suitor largely because of its ownership of Liffe, a major derivatives exchange in London.

For many, the Beaux-Arts New York Stock Exchange, and images of traders looking despondent or exuberant on its floor, represent what making money is all about. Yet Wall Street itself has found it more profitable to bet on fluctuations in natural gas or corn or on interest rates. The financial industry often does so electronically and through platforms in cities as scattered as London, Chicago and Atlanta. The biggest bonuses each year are typically for traders who reaped rich gains on these often complex financial products.

That change, decades in the making, has left the New York exchange, with roots going back 220 years, in an increasing difficult position as trading volumes slump and profit margins stay razor thin. While its acquirer has pledged to keep a dual headquarters in the exchange building in Lower Manhattan, as well as in Atlanta, the center of power in finance long ago migrated elsewhere.

The success of the newly combined companies hinges on the derivatives business. ICE is hoping that a greater share of derivatives trading will go through its clearinghouse operations, which act as backstops in case one party defaults. It is being aided by the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul, which is forcing Wall Street banks to push their derivatives trades into clearinghouses and regulated exchanges.

“For the past decade, our solutions made our markets increasingly electronic and increasingly clear,” Jeffrey C. Sprecher, chief executive of ICE, said this month. “Today, financial reform is imposing that vision on many markets through a rule-making process.”

While Dodd-Frank compliance is still in its early days, and the volume of derivatives trading remains depressed amid broader economic uncertainty, the law is ultimately expected to cement ICE’s business model into the regulatory code.

“Despite the complaints, there’s no question that at the end of the day, Dodd-Frank will be a financial boon to exchanges,” said Bart Chilton, a Democratic member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates derivatives.

Still, such a development will not do much for the traditional business of the New York Stock Exchange. Mr. Sprecher said on Thursday that he was committed to keeping the floor of the exchange open. But according to people briefed on his plans, he intends to use the stock trading operation and its steady cash-generating abilities to finance future deals and expansion efforts.

Nowhere have the changing fortunes of ICE and the parent of the New York exchange, NYSE Euronext, been more apparent than in their value on the stock market. In April 2011, when ICE first tried to acquire NYSE Euronext in league with Nasdaq OMX, it was worth about $1.5 billion less than the New York company. Just over a year later, ICE was worth nearly $4 billion more than NYSE Euronext, even with less than a third of its revenue.

ICE was founded in 2000 by Mr. Sprecher, who began his career developing power plants. In the 1990s, he saw that many power companies and financial firms wanted to hedge their investments in energy with financial contracts, but the market for these contracts was disorganized and opaque.

Mr. Sprecher bought an obscure exchange for buying and selling electricity in Atlanta and turned it into ICE with financing from BP and Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Banks were drawn to the idea of a standardized place to buy and sell derivatives tied to the value of oil and other commodities. But they also hoped to create a competitor to the virtual monopoly position being built up by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in futures trading.

“You talk to people in Chicago, they basically think that ICE is just a front for the banks,” said Craig Pirrong, an expert in futures trading and director of the Global Energy Management Institute at the University of Houston.

As the company grew through a quick series of acquisitions, Mr. Sprecher won a reputation for being the “enfant terrible” of the energy industry, with a “sharp eye for identifying opportunities and seizing on them in a very aggressive way,” Dr. Pirrong said.

Early on, ICE sought to move all trading onto computers, allowing firms to buy and sell contracts 24 hours a day. Soon after buying the International Petroleum Exchange in London, ICE shut down its trading floor.

“They were a technology company from Day 1,” said Brad Hintz, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein.

ICE also decided to fashion its own clearinghouse, rather than tap an outsize firm. It expanded through acquisitions, planting the seeds for growth in 2008, when it took over the Clearing Corporation, home to a popular derivative known as a credit-default swap.

The Dodd-Frank overhaul may provide additional benefits for ICE. Under the law, exchanges must turn over public and private information to outside data warehouses, which will, in turn, share the information with regulators. Sensing an opportunity, ICE created its own warehouse, named ICE Trade Vault.

ICE and its Chicago rival, CME Group, have also moved in recent months to convert swaps trades, which are facing more scrutiny under Dodd-Frank, into old-fashioned futures contracts. Futures trading is lucrative territory for the exchanges in part because they can shut out competitors.

“The reality is that there are incentives to convert swaps into futures, where there’s less competition,” said Richard M. McVey, chief executive of MarketAxess, an independent trading platform that is expanding into the swaps business. “There’s no requirement for CME and ICE to open their futures clearinghouses to other exchanges.”

Despite its growing prominence, ICE has a small footprint in Washington. With only two full-time lobbyists, the company relies on Mr. Sprecher to communicate with regulators.

“Jeff is the company,” one official said, though others said he had loosened his grip over the last year or so.

He is well received, officials say, in part because he has embraced some reforms. Unlike executives of other exchanges and financial firms, Mr. Sprecher did not resist an effort in 2009 by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to close certain loopholes.

Officials recall him saying, “Tell me what the rules are, and I’ll make money with them.”

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.
Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesTraders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Article source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/exchange-sale-reflects-new-realities-of-trading/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Economix Blog: Nancy Folbre: The Twilight of the Public Corporation

September 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Nancy Folbre, economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Public corporations that ordinary people can invest in and get rich from represent one of the great selling points of American capitalism – at least according to the salesmen.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

Yet public corporations, which rose to dominance in the United States economy in the second half of the 20th century, are now waning in significance.

As Gerald Davis of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan points out, the number of public corporations in the United States in 2009 was only half what it was in 1997. The share of employment represented by the largest 25 corporations has also declined over time.

Professor Davis asserts these trends result from increased reliance on overseas contractors for manufacturing, discussed in my last post.

Public corporations have also become less public. Professor Davis contends that share ownership has become heavily concentrated through mutual funds, such as Fidelity, which he says now holds significant blocks of 10 percent to 15 percent in many large companies. Even Fidelity’s role is overshadowed by BlackRock, proprietor of iShares Exchange Traded Funds, which, Professor Davis estimates, was the single largest shareholder in one out of five corporations in the United States in 2011.

Private companies going public often rely on “dual-class shares” that give original owners more voting rights than other investors. The founders of both Groupon and Zynga gained extra clout in this way.

The incentives to “go public” are smaller than they once were, because the rise of private equity firms and hedge funds has made it easier to raise money outside the stock market. Private companies are less subject to government regulation and oversight. As The Economist put it in a recent article discussing this trend, “Companies are like jets; the elite go private.”

The rise of shareholder activism may be contributing to the trend. The California Public Employees Retirement System, a major pension fund investor, is now campaigning strongly against dual-class shares, threatening the viability of that strategy for maintaining minority control.

In June, many stockholders of this country’s largest public corporation, Wal-Mart Stores publicly registered strong discontent with its policies. They were unable to dislodge the company’s chief executive, because the Walton family stood behind him with their substantial voting shares. It seems likely, however, that both majority owners and management were discomfited by the bad publicity.

Shareholder activism itself reflects a growing disillusionment on the part of individual investors, many of whom have quietly fled the stock market. In 2012, 53 percent of American households polled by Gallup reported that they had investments in the stock market, through individual accounts, mutual funds or retirement accounts, down from 67 percent in 2002.

Net investments in mutual funds, variable annuities, exchange-traded funds, and closed-end funds burgeoned between 2001 and 2007 only to sag in the wake of the Great Recession. They are now lower than they were in 2001 (See Figure 1.3 of the Investment Fact Book).

Declining real returns explain much of this change. As Professor Davis observes, the “first 10 years of the 21st century represented the single worst period of stock market performance in U.S. history.” The Standard Poor’s 500 index has yet to regain its 2000 level.

But disillusionment with the public corporation also plays a role. Accounting scandals, insider trading violations, and bailouts have taken a toll.

Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that three-quarters of students surveyed at 18 high schools across 11 different states agreed with the statement: “The stock market is rigged mostly to benefit greedy Wall Street bankers.”

This is a pretty dark view. No wonder Professor Davis refers to the “twilight” of the public corporation.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/the-twilight-of-the-public-corporation/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,