Ben Roberts's blog

The securities lending summit in London on Tuesday this week was a detailed and energetic conference, getting off to a flyer with a focus on prime brokers and their hedge fund clients. I’ve generally found this to be the case in past conferences: the borrowing side is frequently the most succinct in analysing the market – perhaps that’s down to their position of sitting in between the energetic lending desks and astute hedge fund managers in the stock lending chain.

It should be an unwritten rule for international securities lending conferences: when you have discussions about beneficial owners, including their level of education and the question as to whether they are lending or not, you must have beneficial owners in the room.

It has been written a few times across the miscellany of both financial and popular media that the Chinese character ‘crisis' also contains the symbol for ‘opportunity'. Or something like that. A continued slump in the financial markets does not necessarily puts the breaks on innovation or creativity, even if access to the money to fund new trading systems or instruments or strategies is less easy to come by.

Yesterday's second GSL Summit - "Lending For Liquidity" - produced a necessary balance between the significant changes on both sides of the transaction in stock loans, with many trenchant observations.

The first panel comprised three beneficial owners and three service providers who discussed in detail the themes of responsibility, risks, the wider public perception of the industry and, above all, whether securities lending can be considered a front office activity.

The last few weeks have been marked by the cautious hope for a sustained incline in the fragile equity markets. Despite a dip in performance yesterday - the Dow Jones in particular was spooked yesterday by the conflicting signals coming out of Bank of America - there have been day-on-day rises in the major markets. The FTSE 100 at the beginning of the week stayed with its head above the 4,000 mark, which is a watershed of sorts after a severely depleted March performance.