Most people reading this probably already know that revenues at CFD providers tend to be split along Pareto principle lines.
In other words, 80% of sales are attributable to 20% of clients. Looking at the accounts of some brokers, it’s plausible you can keep going with that so that about 50% of revenues are generated by 1% of clients.
Whatever the exact details are, the point remains that a small proportion of clients tend to make up a large proportion of your overall sales numbers.
When Capital.com took on OvalX’s (aka ETX) client book after the latter company collapsed earlier this year, it’s plausible some of those ‘big fish’ clients also made the move over to the Capital.com platform.
However, and I know I am late in realising this, if you look at some of the executive moves that took place around that time, it’s plausible that most of them went elsewhere.
Firstly, Tobin Utley, who was on the institutional desk at OvalX – which presumably meant mainly higher value clients – went to Spreadex.
Spreadex is not a company we cover often here but they are an interesting one, in part because they are (I believe) the only broker left that still offers sports betting – something which IG and City Index both used to do many aeons ago.
They also make good money (£27.6m in profit on £71.2m in sales) with only c.150 employees. Not bad. We understand that part of the reason for their success is that they have basically got a very good set of premium clients.
The other big departures from OvalX were Tony Adams, Jackie Alexander, and Mark Foulds.
Now I know many of you will be thinking ‘what was the three-time FA Cup winner and former Arsenal captain doing at OvalX?’ but this is actually a different Tony Adams.
Anyway, that trio were all on the HNWI / Professional sales desk at Ovalx and have all moved to Alvar Financial Services, the company which operates Intertrader. According to Foulds’ LinkedIn page, he was managing c.£200m in client assets at OvalX.
You can’t say for sure but if we assume the bulk of those clients went with the respective employees to either Spreadex and Alvar/InterTrader, then presumably Capital got all the rubbish ones – 80% of the clients, 20% of the revenue.
Eurotrader’s stock trading app
As with the previous part of this article, this is not new but I only just realised it. And because I only just noticed it, maybe you hadn’t didn’t know about it either.
Eurotrader is a broker owned by Dr Ozan Ozerk, a man we like to think is known to his friends as ‘Dr Oz’ (no relation).
Eurotrader has set up a few brands now, with a regular retail offering and institutional desk. However, they have also set up a stock trading app called Gratis.io, which is yet to launch but has opened a waiting list.
I don’t really get what the point of this is as it’s separate from the main Eurotrader offering, meaning there is no ability to cross sell. There are also, according to the company’s website, no fees charged.
We’ve written before about the logistics of adding equities and how you can make money from it. The main point is that you cannot really half-ass it and it takes years + loads of investment to make money from it. Unless you are using the service to cross sell other products that are more profitable, it’s hard to see how viable this is long-term.
Doo Prime is worth watching
Doo Prime is a retail CFD provider and one of several brands owned by Doo Group, a firm that appears to be based in Hong Kong.
The company already has licences in a couple of offshore jurisdictions and Australia. But over the past six months or so they have been hiring in Cyprus.
Most recently, the company hired Anca Ionescu in their Cypriot office. The company also hired Roman Kalinin, who was previously CEO of FIBO Group.
Doo Group also has an institutional business in the UK that has existed for several years, although it’s not clear any expansion efforts are underway there.
Key hires in Cyprus suggest that the company is going to try and expand in Europe, or at least grow its Cypriot entity.
Will Robinhood buy a UK company?
Last month we looked at how Robinhood said it was planning on expanding into the UK by the end of this year.
The company reiterated that point in a recent analyst call when it released its quarterly results.
It seems unlikely that they are lying but it’s increasingly hard to understand how they plan on achieving that goal given that they are hiring zero people in the UK.
Robinhood has man one significant hire in the UK (Jordan Sinclair) and that’s it. They have one job listing on their website for the UK, which is for a compliance role.
This makes me think one of two things could happen. One is that Robinhood may acquire a UK company instead of bothering to launch properly.
Lightyear may be one target. This is another low cost investing app and a few of the people there were on board to join Robinhood UK when it was supposed to launch a couple of years ago. That ultimately fell through because of regulatory concerns. Lightyear probably makes no money and will struggle to raise funds at the moment.
Given Robinhood have about four months to hit their target of launching in the UK by the end of the year, if they don’t do this then it is probably going to be the softest launch ever and will basically be US commission-free stocks and nothing else.
And that links into our other possibility, and this should never be ruled out, which is that they think it’s easy to launch in another country and so aren’t bothering to do much hiring.
My theory here is that many new stockbrokers make the assumption that their product is easily replicable and so expanding into a new market is easy. This is kind of understandable with CFDs but with stock trading it’s much more complex.
As one example of this, most people in the UK want to invest in equities via tax efficient accounts, like ISAs or SIPPs. If you don’t have a good offering in this regard then there is basically no point in launching the service, unless you plan on cross selling other products.
If Robinhood is not cross selling into options or going to try and do the whole ISA / SIPP thing then, like with Gratis, it is hard to see what the point is or how viable the UK entity would be long-term.
Plus500 gets a Bahamas licence
Plus500 has spent much of the past two years acquiring different licences and setting up new entities. There was the Estonian licence, the UAE licence, the Japanese acquisition, the Seychelles licence, and the US acquisition.
Now you can add to that list a Bahamas licence. The Israeli firm announced on Monday in its H1 results that it had acquired a licence in the Caribbean country in July of this year.
Some of these newly acquired licences were more noteworthy than others in the sense that it’s not entirely clear why they got them. For instance, the Estonian one might be for crypto but we don’t know.
The Seychelles entity was clearly designed to take business offshore. But this then makes you wonder, why bother getting a Bahamas licence if you already have one in the Seychelles? The mysteries of regulatory regimes.