Morning Coffee: Orcel’s UBS shakeup gets nasty. Trader makes £200k gambling on Scottish vote

Andrea Orcel is shaking up UBS. As Financial News noted last week. UBS has been hiring all sorts of new senior investment bankers this year (eg. Ian Carnegie Brown, Nick Reid, Giles Borten, Glenn Rewick) as Orcel ‘hot rods’ the investment bank for better performance. In truth, Financial News says the hot-rodding is being overseen by William Vereker, whom Orcel hired from Nomura last year to oversee UBS’s client business. UBS’s M&A business was too sedate, it seems.

So far, so predictable. – Orcel was a career M&A banker before he became chief executive of UBS’s investment bank, and a resetting of the Swiss bank’s M&A culture was inevitable. Suddenly, however, Orcel has ventured into new territory: he’s tackling UBS’s enormous equities business.

While UBS’s M&A business is good but not great, its equities business is among the market leaders. UBS has ranked number one for pan-European equities trading and execution (according to Thomson Extel) since 2010, and it’s the third largest trader of cash equities in Europe according to Markit. In theory, UBS’s equities business might have therefore been excluded from any shakeup. In reality, it’s being hot-rodded too.

Yesterday, UBS announced new co-heads of its global equities business, only one of whom comes from its existing ranks. Bloomberg reported that Roger Naylor, current head of equity derivatives, is being promoted to global head along with Robert Karofsky, who’s being hired in from Alliance Bernstein. Naylor and Karofsky are both Deutsche Bank veterans. Their elevation marks the resurgence of UBS’s derivatives-focused ex-Deutsche contingent which expanded under ex-Deutsche equities man Yassine Bouhara pre-2011 but was knocked back when Bouhara quit in the wake of the Kweku Adoboli scandal. Back then, Bouhara was replaced by Mike Stewart from BofA. Stewart immediately set about hiring his own BofA men into UBS and the ex-Deutsche crowd dwindled, with the crucial exception of Naylor. Now, Naylor’s back on top and Stewart’s being shunted into the private bank. Harsh.

Separately, a mystery trading veteran reportedly made £200k after correctly betting that Scotland would vote no. He cautions against other people taking similar gambling risks though, saying that he engaged in lengthy analysis of the probability of a no vote using techniques informed by the 30 years he spent working with markets before placing his bet.