Nomura launched its Delta One America’s group and event-driven/special situations product offerings today. Separately, the firm has also announced it is beefing up its equities research staff.
The Delta One team’s goal is to generate trading ideas for clients through analysis of event-driven and relative value arbitrage opportunities, and to provide liquidity for executions of customer orders and spread trades.
Heading up the new group is Tony Hayden. He will be responsible for building and managing Nomura’s Delta One business in the Americas, an effort that will complement the firm’s Global Delta One franchise. A veteran with more than 20-years of equities trading experience, Hayden comes from JPMorgan where he ran its North American Delta One Trading operations.
The firm also hired Jason Osier as a managing director and will head the firm’s single stock derivatives trading team. Osier, a former buysider, leads Nomura’s single stock derivatives trading team for the Americas. He joins from Plural Investments, where he was a managing director and equity long-short portfolio manager. Prior to joining Plural in 2007, Osier spent 10-years as a sales trader, most recently at Banc of America Securities where he was head of single-stock derivatives trading. He reports to Jonathan Larkin, head of trading, equities Americas.
"We have created a strong culture of taking and managing risk at Nomura, Jason and Tony enhance our ability to offer liquidity and creative solutions to our clients in U.S. products, including our new event-driven and Delta One offerings," said Ciaran O’Kelly, head of equities for the Americas at Nomura.
Delta One trading is where banks create securities that track an underlying index or asset. The bank then provides clients with exposure to these securities or indices and takes responsibility for hedging those exposures themselves. Bank profit is generated by managing the client risk. So money is made by the bank from hedges as well as from collecting margins or fees from clients.
Delta One strategies can also include high-frequency trading arbitrage strategies and algorithms which exploit asset values.
Both Hayden and Osier will also serve as members of Nomura’s newly launched Event-Driven/Special Situations team.
In addition, the firm hired Francis "Pope" Fabrizio for its equity research sales team in Boston and Richard Sears for the global product sales group in New York. The firm is also opening sales offices for U.S. products in London, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.
Fabrizio joins from FBR & Co., where he was most recently a managing director in equity research sales and a member of the firm’s Operating Committee.
Sears is charged with building the firm’s global product sales business in the Americas. This group offers institutional and hedge fund clients access to a full range of equities products and services. He joins from Macquarie, where he worked in Institutional equity research sales and built and managed a mid-markets sales desk.
Earlier this week, Nomura announced it was integrating its Instinet subsidiary into the brokerage giant, and the company plans to rebrand its entire Japanese electronic trading platform as Instinet.
According to sources familiar with the matter, there are several areas in which Instinet and Nomura currently compete, and the company wanted to make sure it no longer offers rival electronic products. The duplications came about after Nomura acquired some of the assets of now defunct Lehman Bros.
