Barclays Share Discussion Threads

[luderitz] 19/6/2017 10:55

Regarding charges is the new monthly charge instead or as well as the 6 monthly charge do you know?

[forcemode] 19/6/2017 10:29

Definitely an increase in charges is on the cards! I've just got off from a web chat and for me personally will have to pay 17GBP per month! Not a happy bunny!

[luderitz] 19/6/2017 10:21

chancer,

I'm also a concerned Barclays Stockbroker A/C holder and agree the changes look like an excuse to put up charges.

Their explanation pack should be with us this week so am waiting to see what is in it for us traders.. and what isn't!

[r ball] 19/6/2017 08:15

Has news leaked?

[johnwise] 19/6/2017 07:57

SFO to make decision in Barclays case as soon as Tuesday, reports say

[johnwise] 19/6/2017 07:55

Barclays Hiring Under US Scrutiny

[alphorn] 18/6/2017 21:30

Agree, as the likes of Barclays and BP get cleaner litigation-wise they could become targets with the drop in sterling.

[diku] 18/6/2017 21:14

Mercer...the market is built on speculation, sentiment & news....so the takeover is do-able....and the US are masters of mega deals...

[bernie37] 18/6/2017 18:30

Jes Staley's last few months resemble what in polite society let’s refer to as an ‘insanitary sandwich’. First there were strong full-year results for 2016, with headline pre-tax profits nearly tripling to £3.2bn. But then came whistleblower-gate, where the CEO was formally reprimanded for directing Barclays security to identify a staff member making accusations against a senior appointment.

That's enough to leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth. The American will hope that strong first quarter results will help cleanse the palate: Q1 pre-tax profits doubled to £1.2bn, driven in large part by a 70% reduction in non-core losses.

Pesky, non-core risk-weighted assets (RWAs) are about as fashionable these days as the flat-top mullet. Since the crisis, all bank bosses have been busy shaving them off, under the beady eye of the regulators. Staley’s efforts are certainly beginning to pay off. Barclays' RWAs are now only £27bn, having been over £75bn at the end of 2014.


Broadly, Staley’s strategy is cut RWAs, and double down on British and American investment and commercial banking, but for a more detailed look, here’s MT’s take on his first full-year results, from 1 March 2016.

When Barclays chairman John McFarlane gave ‘Saint Antony’ Jenkins the boot last year, you’d have been forgiven for expecting a dramatic turn in the bank’s strategy. New CEO Jes Staley is, after all, an American I-Bank veteran, who spent years at JP Morgan Chase. You wouldn't replace ethical retail banker Jenkins with an investment banker only to have him behave like Jenkins, right?

Yet what’s actually changed? Staley almost immediately started reading from Jenkins’ hymn book, talking of ‘completing the necessary transformation’; and seeking a ‘less capital intensive’ investment arm. Indeed, he has in some respects continued along the cost-cutting and de-risking course plotted by Jenkins years ago. The bank cut its non-core risk-weighted assets (RWAs) by 39% to £46.6bn in 2015, while Staley recently announced it would exit first eight countries in the Asia-Pacific region and then the whole of Africa (read why here).

But the apparent similarities do belie an important shift in strategy. In Barclays’ 2014 full-year results, the word ‘transformR17; appeared 62 times – very largely because that was the name of Jenkins’ restructuring programme, designed to shrink the investment bank to a more modest size. In 2015’s results, the word doesn’t appear once.

Why did Barclays sack Saint Antony? Read MT's report on Jenkins' three years at the top.

Staley is trying to get rid of RWAs because every bank has to get rid of RWAs if they know what’s good for them. He’s retreating from Asia and Africa not out of any reluctance to seek out higher risks and higher rewards, but because he wants to take them over here instead.

‘At the heart of Barclays’ strategy is to build on our strength as a transatlantic Consumer, Corporate and Investment bank anchored in the two financial centres of the world, London and New York,’ he said.

This will be one of the two new divisions within Barclays, the other being its ring-fenced UK retail bank, but there’s little doubt where Staley sees the profits coming from. The first stage of his plan is similar to Jenkins’ out of sheer necessity. Barclays has little choice after all but to ride out the ‘legacy headwinds’ of regulatory charges (it set aside another £4bn for PPI mis-selling, forex fixing and other litigation in 2015) and imposed capital ratios.

Selling down its stake in its African bank and, indeed, cutting its 2016 and 2017 dividends by 54% will both help Barclays to do that. But the legacy storm won’t rage forever. Once the painful battering of regulatory pay-outs ends, Staley has promised that his ‘dramatically simplified’ bank will ‘pay out a significant proportion of earnings in dividends to shareholders over time’.

(Unsurprisingly they weren’t impressed at such vagueness. Shares were briefly suspended after falling 11% on the news, and it wasn’t because of the company’s fundamentals. Adjusted pre-tax profits were down 2% to £5.4bn, while its statutory annual loss after tax, dividends and provisions for Forex and PPI charges more than doubled to £374m – nothing investors won’t have been expecting.)

Whether that’s the be all and end all of Staley’s strategy remains to be seen. It could be that the bank is mustering its strength for something that won’t have been discussed in Barclays’ august boardroom since the days when it gobbled up what was left of Lehmans - expansion.

It’s a fairly basic rule of business, after all, that if you’ve found out what you do well (in this case, Staley clearly believes, UK and US investment banking), then do more of it. Could the bank be preparing to make up some of the ground it lost in recent years on Staley’s home turf, Wall Street? It’s far from certain that this is what Staley wants or indeed if the bank could manage it, but it would certainly cast his appointment in a new light.


Read more at hxxp://www.managementtoday.co.uk/jes-staleys-strategy-barclays/article/1380329#m34WcsrxC7culjow.99

[mercer95] 18/6/2017 13:19

I take it that's all guess work diku, I've got a fact, off topic, I didn't even realise until recently that as a white person in London I'm in a minority of 45% & those are 2012 figures, Tony Blairs open door policy to immigration, referred to as an enrichment programme by the lefties, called operation Trojan horse by others DYOR, has been a complete failure, these last couple of weeks have been a real eye opener for me.

[diku] 18/6/2017 08:21

Those US banks want Barc's US equities trading business...get Lehmans back via the back door...other alternative is a consortium of banks make a bid for the whole of Barc....the consortium takes the slice they want & the rest is sold off to other financial parties..

[bernie37] 17/6/2017 17:54

Barclays seems to recognize that it has issues to address in its U.S. equities trading business. As we were first to report last month, Joe Corcoran, global head of markets and head of markets Americas has stepped aside and Tim Throsby, the new head of Barclays’ investment bank is taking personal control of whatever happens next. Something needs to be done: Barclays bought a strong U.S. equities business from Lehman Brothers but many of the ex-Lehmanites have left and global equities trading revenues at the bank were down 10% year-on-year in the first quarter.

Even before Throsby moved in, Barclays insiders say Corcoran had applied some muscle to the issue. In the past few months, he reportedly engaged the services of John Neary, founder of 3000Kings LLC and a consultant to the financial services sector.

Neary has pedigree. Before setting up 3000Kings in April 2013, he spent seven years at Morgan Stanley, latterly as global head of multi-asset portfolios and previously as head of equities trading for the Americas. Before that, he spent nearly fourteen years at Goldman Sachs, where he was head of equity portfolio trading for the U.S. At Barclays. he’s said to be working on “special projects.”

Barclays didn’t respond to a request to comment on Neary’s involvement, but the bank appears to be in good hands.

Insiders say turning around Barclays’ U.S. equities business won’t be easy, however. Under Mike Di Iorio, the former global head of equities sales who quit for Credit Suisse in May, they argue that Barclays focused too heavily on equity derivatives. Eric Schlanger, the head of U.S. equities, has allegedly cut a lot of cash distribution and trading staff, and the electronic equities business has never recovered from the 2014 dark pool scandal. “Barclays has been ditching people and struggling with the same issues as a lot of other banks – do you focus on the dark pool or the central risk book?”, says one MD, speaking off the record. “The problem is that there are a lot of costs associated with running a dark pool and with an electronic trading business in general, and it’s difficult to justify them when margins are poor and commissions are compressed.”

Someone – be it Neary or Throsby himself – needs to fix this. Earlier this month, Barclays lost Joe Mecane, its global head of electronic equities, to Citadel Securities, leaving a gap at the top of that business. The good news is that Barclays already has a deep bench: in October last year it hired Bob Gasser, formerly of ITG as head of strategy for pre-market trading technology; it also still employs Mecane’s predecessor, Bill White, although White’s current function is unclear. The bad news is that Barclays’ problems seem to go deeper than personnel.

Barclays’ insiders nonetheless have high hopes for the bank’s U.S. equities business under its new management. Not everyone is convinced though. As we reported earlier, J.P. Morgan’s banking analysts are predicting that revenues will fall by another 9% at Barclays’ equities trading business this year, more than at any other bank.

[bernie37] 17/6/2017 17:41

JULY
28
2017
Barclays Interim 2017 Results

[bernie37] 17/6/2017 16:52

I haven't got 5 years to wait, 18 months tops, should have left my investment in stobart at 95p now 291 and also dividend increase from 5p to 18p

[jordaggy] 17/6/2017 15:44

Good find Bernie.
You know what? even if Barc has to payout 2 to $3 billion in fines...it's peanuts in the long term. 5 years from now, Barc will be paying out great divi's and I reckon the share price could be double. It's been a painful 9 years but the worst is over for banks. Barc to me look to be making all the right moves...keep the faith.

[bernie37] 17/6/2017 14:00

Take a look at ‘Barclays Said to Plan Guilty Plea in Qatar Case’ on Yahoo Finance

[johnwise] 17/6/2017 06:29

[LONDON] Barclays Plc plans to plead guilty to UK charges that it failed to make proper disclosures about a multi-billion-pound capital raising from Qatar during the financial crisis, according to a person with knowledge of the process.

[bernie37] 16/6/2017 19:07

I should have stayed with stobart at 149sp

[johnwise] 16/6/2017 18:55

Video

Barclays strategist: You can expect a major department store to fail in the next 18 months

[clond] 16/6/2017 10:03

Didn't do much good as the investment bank returns have been dire with jp Morgan defects.

[fearnwood] 15/6/2017 22:49

Looks like the SFO is going to announce the outcome of the Qatari investigation imminently...
hxxp://news.sky.com/story/barclays-braced-for-outcome-of-five-year-sfo-fundraising-probe-10915874
If this article is correct then they're getting charged, I expect that this has been responsible for the negative affect on the share price over the last few days.