Five years ago I wrote a thought piece called ‘Through the Looking Glass’ to provoke non-linear thinking and foster debate on the possible future direction of the financial services industry and market structures. (I later turned it into a short video called AmazonBay.) It was a retrospective told from the point of view of an observer in 2015. It was never meant to be taken literally – in particular with respect to (most of) the specific corporate mergers – rather I used these as a concise and dramatic way of highlighting the possible or even probable consequence of the deep secular currents that I felt would inevitably work to reshape the landscape.
(December 2015:) …The global securities and investment banking groups that dominated the market in the last century are now extinct. In their place we have an intelligent galaxy of new specialist advisory, investment management, algorithmic software and consulting firms networked with a universe of powerful transaction facilitation exchanges. Banks now exist only as giant regulated pools of capital.
Following the sweeping banking reforms proposed last week by President Obama, and the fact that we are now halfway to this hypothetical future, I thought it might be worth doing a quick mark-to-market of how my ideas have lined up with reality.
Oracle
stock exchange consolidation and emergence of new exchange venues (A-) pretty close both in outcomes and timing – the major stock exchanges have been merging a-go-go while at the same time new trading venues have proliferated, and exchange (or quasi-exchange) trading of new asset classes continues to develop strongly.
sports/outcome trading in US legitimized (B-) my narrative had this happening in February 2010, not there yet but Congressman Frank’s bill might open the doors later this year and the trend seems to be on the right track and will probably be signed into law by Obama (!); as an aside was way early on a Betfair IPO…
giant bank mergers followed by break-up of vertically integrated universal banks, with Goldman Sachs leading the way (A) we have seen the big get mostly even bigger (RBS/ABN, BoA/ML, Barclays/Lehman…and while JPMorgan didn’t buy MS, they did get Bear Stearns and WaMu); GS hasn’t yet broken itself into three as predicted but I’m still confident it will lead the way when/if industry structure changes, and more generally the trend of regulatory thinking across the globe is definitely a trailing wind for the kind of change I envisioned. The 2010-2012 timeframe for the re-organization of global banks is probably a bit early but plausibility has certainly gone up (from near zero) significantly since I wrote this.
more (and more) algorithmic / automated intermediation of markets (A-) this was obliquely referenced in my article but was really at the heart of the idea that this fictional ‘AmazonBay’ platform would end up dominating this aspect of markets; clearly the market is heading this way – in fact it may seem obvious now but most people did not fully understand this even as little as five years ago.
Amazon anything (B+) The jury is probably still out on this one, but in my view it is looking increasingly likely that Amazon.com will become a giant of the next economic paradigm; whether or not they use their vast intellectual and technological resources to participate more directly in the financial services arena is not yet clear, but I can tell you the only ‘big company’ job I would not hesitate for two minutes to accept if it were offered would be CEO or CSO of Amazon Financial Services (AFS) Jeff are you listening?
(Note: Remember I used real company names mainly to add vividness to the ideas underlying the narrative. The key concept I wanted to convey with this GS break-up vignette was that the vertically integrated model would decompose under the light of new technology and regulations into a (technology-centric) Sales & Trading component, a more focused, relationship driven Advisory component (cf. the emerging proliferation of pure advisory ’boutiques’) and independent, conflict-free Asset Management businesses (cf. the secular growth of hedge funds and Barclays sale of BGI, etc.))
(February 2009:) …Reacting to new competition, Goldman Sachs becomes the first major investment bank to break itself up. Securities and distribution are sold to Ebay Financial Markets, while the remaining activities are split into two new companies: GS Advisory Services and GS Capital management…
Charlatan
eBay anything (D) Despite the fact that the actual companies cited are more symbolic than literal, the choice of eBay to represent the cutting edge of online, data-driven, algorithmic marketplaces was simply awful. To the extent that it risks distracting the viewer from the key, underlying messages. It is now entirely implausible and so instead of bridging the cognitive gap, the inclusion of eBay simply extends it. Thank goodness this is somewhat mitigated by my inclusion of Amazon.com (see above) as the other new markets avatar but they come late to the narrative…
sports trading developing as an asset class (C+) this clearly hasn’t happened, although there are one or two small funds and firms offering managed accounts; and a vibrant ecosystem of professional traders and the associated software has emerged around the Betfair and other exchange platforms. In my defense, I picked sports as just a provocative and emotionally attractive example of the idea that – enabled by technology – a vast array of new tradable markets in goods but also outcomes, would emerge. Work in progress.
credit crunch and asset bubbles (D) although the overall purpose of the piece was to provoke thinking on the sustainability of existing business models in financial services in the face of radically shifting underlying technological, economic and demographic trends, I failed to include a thread touching on the possibility of catastrophic systemic discontinuities arising as a result of the prevailing market structure and business models. It’s a significant ommission, especially as at the time of writing this I was in the process of exiting my former responsibilities as a senior executive in the credit business due in part to my increasing discomfort with the sustainability and prudence of the risk pricing in that market.
All in all, I would give myself a mid-term grade of B+/A- with room both to improve and to slip back. Mostly on the right track, especially with respect to big themes but perhaps a bit optimistic in terms of some of the timelines. What do you think? Better? Worse? To be fair, the correct measuring stick is not so much whether or not I was right or wrong, even in terms of ‘macro’ predictions but whether or not this article and video helped catalyze serious discussion, debate and thought about the potential for disruptive and non-linear change in the financial services industry. Alas I have no idea how one could even attempt to measure that, but any thoughts or anecdotes you might have with respect to this would of course be appreciated.
A few years ago Congressman Frank Wolf ranted in Congress that if UIGEA was not passed, people would be gambling in … (wait for it…) THEIR BATHROBES!!! Shocking I know. So many lives ruined. If they had only pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans…
Anyhow, he voted for it:
In 2006, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) was signed into law. This landmark legislation helps to cut off the flow of revenue to unlawful Internet gambling businesses. It outlaws receipt of checks, credit card charges, electronic funds transfers, and the like by such businesses. To do this, it enlists the assistance of banks, credit card issuers and other payment system participants to help stem the flow of gambling dollars.
This is about knowing all of the hard evidence about the byproducts of gambling – crime, corruption, family breakdown, suicide, bankruptcy – and not hearing our country’s leaders speaking out.
Where are the political leaders from both sides of the aisle? Religious leaders? Advocates for children, the poor and the elderly? Their silence is deafening.
It is time for Americans leaders to step forward and address the proliferation of gambling.
(Now replace gambling with banking and maybe we’re talking…UIBEA anyone? LOL)
Anyhow, as widely reported about a month ago, it now seems that the tide is turning, lead by Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank – although I’m not really 100% why other than perhaps that the government needs the money more than it needs to pander to the anti-gambling minority? Or perhaps the gambling oligopolists have decided now they are ready to compete in this market? No idea. Or maybe the message on the absurdity of prohibition coming from the Park Paradigm has worked its magic! (Sure, it could happen…ok probably not.)
I was also pleasantly surprised to learn from (an excellent and newly discovered blog) Zerobeta, that Delaware was thinking about legalizing sports gambling (picking up on an ESPN article):
The newly elected Markell, who has spent the past several weeks listening to proponents of gambling as well its opponents, is much more of a pragmatist than a betting revolutionary. He hasn’t been to Vegas in nearly 15 years and almost never hits the race track/casinos (called racinos) in his home state. But the way he sees it is this: Delaware already allows horse racing and slots. And with the state currently $700M in the hole, offering the Pats minus-six over the Jets when bettors come by to drop a nickel in the slots isn’t amoral. As he told me a couple months ago, “you can’t really be half-pregnant.”
How refreshing. Legalize. Regulate. Tax. The best way to address Mr. Wolf’s concerns, not prohibition. And for those of you who want to trade the probability of this outcome, head over here to InTrade(HT to Chuck for the pointer.)
(Disclaimer: As some of you may know, I am an investor in Betfair and so have an interest in a free and regulated US market (given the current legislation Betfair does not trade in the US in compliance with all federal and state regulations.) However I would hope that those who know me and even regular readers know that my views on the subject are not driven by this investment. Indeed I would say this investment was driven by my views.)
yoonew is the world’s first futures exchange for event tickets. We have created a dynamic marketplace that helps online consumers save money and time when buying and selling tickets. Our real-time trading platform gives fans, traders, and resellers a safe and transparent place to trade tickets.
We are passionate about leveling the playing field and creating a fair marketplace where everyone has equal access to tickets. Our team focuses on building new product features that will bring transparency to markets where pricing information is not universally available. We help customers make more informed purchasing decisions so they are confident that their purchase or sale concluded at a fair price.
TechCrunch did a write-up in early January and they got a lot of coverage in the run up to the recent Super Bowl game:
I’m not 100% convinced that they’ve nailed it but it is certainly a very interesting step in the right direction in terms of introducing modern (and useful) markets technology into the historically moribund market for live event tickets. Essentially, they are selling call options on tickets to major sporting events. Moreover they have taken an original and clever approach by – at least initially – focusing on major sporting events (like the Super Bowl) where the terminal value of the underlying is different depending on the buyer. ie If “your” team gets through to the game, the tickets are of more value to you. Of course, with a properly functioning secondary market (irrespective of whether on yoonew’s upcoming secondary exchange or another market – StubHub, etc.) financially this should be irrelevant – the ‘market’ value of the tickets depends only on the clearing price of the event once the participants are known. (ie Super Bowl tickets on balance will be worth more if two teams with big, passionate fan bases are playing as opposed to two teams from smaller markets; NY v New England more valuable than Kansas City vs Detroit for example.) So a ‘rational’ trader would try to buy the cheapest options – not necessarily the option on his team, especially if you could re-sell the option before delivery. (I’m not sure this is allowed, if not it should be.) Nonetheless, the (marketing) focus on ‘real’ end buyers (people that hope to take delivery, rather than just make a financial profit) is a good angle as it plays to the psychology of ‘hedging’ rather than speculating and should add heterogeneity to their risk book.
Notwithstanding the ridiculous US laws proscribing trading on sporting outcomes, there would also potentially be very interesting arbitrage and hedging opportunities (for both yoonew as the market-maker and their customers) with trading sports risk. For example (using the same teams as above) going long New England and NY to make the Super Bowl to hedge the extra cost of delivering tickets to this pairing (vs a less valuable team pairing.) Or going long the team in the host city (which would also probably be more valuable on delivery if they ended up playing.) I’m not sure if they have any plans to offer markets on European (or global) events – it would have been great for the recent Rugby World Cup, imagine if England fans could have bought (what would have been) cheap options on the final in Paris – but if they did they could use Betfair to manage their price risk today.
Longer term, ideally you would hope that sports teams and leagues would embrace this kind of market to help manage their own pricing risk. Instead of just selling tickets (in the primary market), they could sell options on tickets and use secondary markets to dynamically hedge their risk. For a team that didn’t sell out systematically, it would be a good way to monetize potentially empty seats and even for teams that sold out perennially it would allow them to be more aggressive in finding the ‘true’ equilibrium clearing price for a given seat. For investors it would be another potential (uncorrelated) asset class to trade and invest in. I wonder what the implied volatility curve on the NY Giants season would look like? Gamma trading based on the weekly game results anyone? The question is do the owners and managers of these teams understand how this could work to everyone’s benefit or will they stick to the old model of static seat prices and unoptimized revenue management?
I hope yoonew succeeds and helps to develop a more enlightened and efficient market for tickets in live events. One to watch.
TMQ’s Gregg Easterbrook, after a sensationalized introduction, asks an interesting question:
On Monday, sellers on StubHub were asking from $750 up to a rather comical $164,710 for tickets to the Ohio State-LSU game (the latter price is for a prime luxury-box seat). The season finale Giants-Patriots NFL game might be historic; on Monday, sellers on StubHub were offering tickets for $200 up to $26,000, depending on seat location or box quality. Once the NFL playoff pairings are known, scalper Web sites will come to life for those contests, too. The asking price is not always the selling price, of course. But bowl committees and NFL teams must be saying to themselves — if these seats really are worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars on the free market, we should be the ones pocketing that scratch. How long will it be until professional teams cut out the middle person and simply auction off tickets for whatever the market will bear?Any day now, the NFL is expected to announce a deal to affiliate all its teams with one online reseller, probably Ticketmaster or StubHub, formally acknowledging reselling as legitimate and bringing the NFL an expected annual fee in the $20 million range. This might be just the first step in converting sports-ticket selling into StubHub World.
If one thinks of tickets like shares of stock, it is unlikely that franchises will initially place 100% of each season’s seats by an electronic auction mechanism. But what percentage will be “placed,” and what percentage will be auctioned?
I think rich people in particular are willing to pay to sit in the same spot (”their” seats in some sense) near others that they recognize. The latter component may be modest, but it might also account for the some of the interest in prosecuting scalpers in the old days. Legal reselling increasingly puts that component at risk. This is a stretch, but one way of interpreting laws against scalping is that clubs didn’t mind you selling tickets to your friends, just any old high bidder.
But Rapino isn’t satisfied with dominating the concert business. He is mounting an audacious attack on the record labels and seeking to poach their most important assets – their stars – by turning Live Nation (Charts) into a one-stop operation that handles their every musical need. His offer: We already operate your tours. Why not let us make your albums, sell your merchandise, run your website, and produce your videos and a range of other products you haven’t yet thought of? This is the age of the empowering Internet, after all. Artists are in charge. Who needs a record label?
Depending on whom you believe, Rapino’s strategy will either reinvent the ailing music industry and turn Live Nation into a powerhouse – or cripple his company. Certainly it’s brash talk for a concert promoter whose toddler-aged company has never put out a single record. But artists have been listening closely since Rapino landed a giant catch. In October he struck a first-of-its-kind deal with Madonna, who bolted her longtime label Warner Bros. and signed a ten-year contract estimated at $120 million to let Live Nation handle every part of her business except publishing.
For what it is worth I think they’ll make money on the Madonna deal, even without attributing a value (which is certainly non-zero) to the marketing/business development angle of this innovative and high profile deal.
For more of my thoughts on how I see these markets developing over time, I refer you to a few earlier posts:
The main story on the capital markets page of the FT today was titled: “World Cup offers investors a sporting chance”
It’s a big question for many large companies but most sports fans do not care. Does commercial sponsorship of big sporting events yield any benefits to the corporations who are doing it?
Official sponsors of this year’s soccer World Cup in Germany have paid up to €45m each for the privilege of becoming an official partner of the tournament and seeing their names beamed into billions of television sets around the world for a month.
The article describes a structured principle-protected basket equity-linked note that is designed to pay-out or outperform if the shares in companies who are major sponsors of this summer’s soccer World Cup in Germany outperform their peers. The investment thesis is that the boost to their respective businesses on the back of the exposure afforded them through their sponsorship of this event will trickle down to their bottom line and ultimately to their share price.
Assuming that today the relative prices of the ’sponsors’ vs their ‘peers’ is appropriate, and that the share price will indeed be positively correlated with the amount of ‘exposure’ the company gets during the World Cup, then surely the sponsor companies (and the investors in these notes) are exposed to what I will call the ‘eyeball value’ of the tournament. I don’t have a formula by which to calculate this factor to hand but I know that it is a positive function of who - the favorites, the home team and most populous countries – does well and how, – how many goals are scored and one (not more!) cinderella team in the pools – the tournament plays out.
So the arbitrageur, or hedging sponsor should be able to trade the basis between the basket note described in the article and a basket of bets on the tournament outcome. ie Someone long of the note (or one of the sponsors) would want to lay Germany (ideally at short odds) and the total number of goals. That way if Germany is knocked out before the play-offs and every game is 0-0 or 1-0 – a real snoozefest – they mitigate the lowered effectiveness (’eyeball value’) of their note (or advertising spend) through their wins on their layer positions.
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