thinking of how Patrick McKenzie speaks of making a practice of buying a few shares in every financial institution he ever deals with just so he can use Investor Relations as a customer service escalation of last resort
Still remember overhearing TS on the phone to one of his disgruntled IR contacts, explaining that his SELL recommendation reflected what an excellent job they had done pitching their shares.
I would contend that the RBS personality cult may have been helped into being by investors, but not as much - or more to the point as loudly - as it was by brokers. With respect, I think the death spiral of the broking industry was the result in the main of the subordination of broking to the IPO ambitions of banks’ capital markets departments. (By the way, if you self-identified as a naive former civil servant you didn’t present as such.)
yes that sounds pretty fair to me. (of course RBS's own Investor relations director was very practiced in manipulating brokers, having switched from being an excellent gamekeeper to a very aggressive poacher).
perhaps the synthesis would be to say that IMO the real death of the industry was not so much IPO bankers as the cult of corporate access. those ridiculous road shows were money in the bank for us on the sell side, with the possibility of getting paid from both sides. and unfortunately but inevitably, the IRs gradually understood how valuable a commodity they were gatekeeping, causing the brokers to very very quickly lose our morals when it came to doing anything other than what we were told.
Paradoxically then the real attraction of the roadshow meeting was being able to ask the ceo or cfo the questions you wanted to get the answers to without the IR running interference or the “congratulations on an excellent quarter, two questions if I may” sellsiders getting in the way
thinking of how Patrick McKenzie speaks of making a practice of buying a few shares in every financial institution he ever deals with just so he can use Investor Relations as a customer service escalation of last resort
"pointless exercise of trying to get stable revenues out of a cyclical business" is the thing in a nutshell.
Still remember overhearing TS on the phone to one of his disgruntled IR contacts, explaining that his SELL recommendation reflected what an excellent job they had done pitching their shares.
I would contend that the RBS personality cult may have been helped into being by investors, but not as much - or more to the point as loudly - as it was by brokers. With respect, I think the death spiral of the broking industry was the result in the main of the subordination of broking to the IPO ambitions of banks’ capital markets departments. (By the way, if you self-identified as a naive former civil servant you didn’t present as such.)
yes that sounds pretty fair to me. (of course RBS's own Investor relations director was very practiced in manipulating brokers, having switched from being an excellent gamekeeper to a very aggressive poacher).
perhaps the synthesis would be to say that IMO the real death of the industry was not so much IPO bankers as the cult of corporate access. those ridiculous road shows were money in the bank for us on the sell side, with the possibility of getting paid from both sides. and unfortunately but inevitably, the IRs gradually understood how valuable a commodity they were gatekeeping, causing the brokers to very very quickly lose our morals when it came to doing anything other than what we were told.
Paradoxically then the real attraction of the roadshow meeting was being able to ask the ceo or cfo the questions you wanted to get the answers to without the IR running interference or the “congratulations on an excellent quarter, two questions if I may” sellsiders getting in the way