The sell side doesn’t quite get it yet.
That is the consensus view among asset managers and independent analysts nine months before the European Union rolls out regulations that will rock the securities research landscape.
Brussels在金融工具指令（MIFID）中的两阶段市场将于明年1月3日生效。它需要基金管理人员披露他们转移到投资者的任何指控，或者自己支付。这应该强制经纪人经销商明确价格为暗艺术，其成本以前被包裹在交易委员会（股权产品）或差价（固定收益）中。反过来，又可以在欧洲，U.K.-尽管迫在眉睫的Brexit - 而且，在其他地方，尽管迫在许，但仍然可以将很多分析师提供了欧洲的工作。
One study drawing attention, from Hong Kong–based consulting firm Quinlan & Associates, predicts global research volumes will plunge 25 to 30 percent by 2020. Russell Napier, co-founder of the upstart, U.K.-based Electronic Research Interchange (ERIC), puts that figure at a minimum of 60 percent. “Absolutely, everything is going to change,” says Julian Allen-Ellis, who heads the MiFID steering committee at the London-based Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), a sell-side lobbying group. “This is truly a shift from an old paradigm to a new paradigm.”
Yet AFME’s members seem to be caught somewhere between procrastination and denial. “A lot of our discussions with the sell side start with, ‘Here’s my cost base and I need to make a margin over that,’” says Nick Anderson, a portfolio manager at Henderson Global Investors, which controls some £100 billion ($122 billion). “They start from the idea that supply-demand is in equilibrium, while clearly it isn’t.”
And that’s the second-tier brokers, who are scrambling to stay in the game post-MiFID II, Anderson says. The giants of investment banking and brokerage are maintaining oracular silence on how they intend to charge for research. “The bulge bracket have gone quiet for the moment,” he says.
Not that designing a new paradigm for research pricing is simple. The ERIC exchange aims to adapt an eBay model, with users bidding for discrete reports. Personal access to outstanding analysts in an ongoing sell-side relationship may be more valuable, Anderson says. “The scarce resource is human interaction,” he says. “Everyone is trying to measure that slightly differently.”
Another ticklish issue is how to charge for multiple users across a buy-side client, as one firm may circulate a given bit of research to two fund managers who pass it on to two dozen more. Autonomous Research, a boutique London firm specializing in financial stocks, addresses these issues with a standardized tier system ranging from “light touch,” which excludes analyst face time, to “premium.” But bigger broker-dealers are offering a confusing range of less transparent arrangements with clients, Autonomous CEO Stuart Graham says. “They will try to obscure true price comparability,” he says.
Nor is the letter of the law entirely clear, AFME’s Allen-Ellis complains. The European Commission handed off its MiFID II text, which numbers some 15,000 pages, to national regulators — the U.K. and France being the bellwethers — that are “drip feeding” interpretations in response to industry queries, he says.
One critical gray area is whether a broker arranging a meeting with a company’s management counts as an “inducement” that must be broken out and priced. “Providing access to managements has always been part of prime brokerage,” Allen-Ellis contends. But buy-siders see this go-between role as outmoded. “The sell side has created a little industry here,” Henderson’s Anderson says. “Our policy is we won’t pay for it.”
一些研究部门的一些轮廓需要赚取其保持似乎是出现的。数十个分析师搅拌了类似的盈利票据可能会被编号。但顾问本杰明昆兰说，基金经理仍将支付独特的视角，顾问。“大多数管理人员在主题贸易思想，技术/情绪的分析和定制，深潜行的行业报告中，提供了更高的价值，”他写道。
买方将不太可能与包括研究所有行业的经纪人的经纪人进入“覆盖海滨”关系，并将更倾向于寻求每个领域的顶级分析师;他们可能需要一些整合。“现在，在30个房屋中可能有两个好人，”安德森说。“如果他们在五个或六个房屋中会更好。”
市场参与者如果需要，如果他们可以向明星分析人员支付，因此，大型投资银行的研究部门应该相对较好地生存。而新环境可能为专科学研究的商店开门，没有别人经纪动机。具有普遍抱负的较小球员可能会挣扎。“资产管理人员将使用五到十个凸起支架，然后也许是十个精品店的名册，”自治首席执行官Graham预测。“中间的人不是很好的人会被挤压。”
As for price, sell-side brokers who pride themselves on their deal-making skills face a challenging new haggle over the cost of their own wares. “You’ll only know you’re at the right price when someone says, ‘We’ll turn you off if you pay less,’” one European fund manager says. “We haven’t really gotten there yet.”