Penny-pinching BayFront off to a blistering start
Rob Chalmers, founder of the Street's newest investment bank, is miffed with his partners.
It seems one of the proven financiers who walked away from an established dealer to throw in his lot with BayFront Capital Partners used the upstart's photocopier to print the entire prospectus for a junior company. Mr. Chalmers is taking pains to point out that photocopying costs money. While no one is willing to confess to Xerox abuse, the partners seem sincerely sorry.
This is not the Street's typical attitude toward costs. But BayFront is not a typical dealer.
Less than six months after opening the doors with nothing more than a rented desk and his own ambition, Mr. Chalmers has attracted a trio of partners who embrace a small-is-beautiful approach to finance. The team targets what they see as an under-serviced niche, raising $15-million or less for growth companies that can't get in the door at traditional dealers.
Converts to the cause include Mike Berry, who walked away this week from a senior role on the sales team at Cormark Securities, and anchored Yorkton Securities' desk prior to that.
There there's Mike Curtis, who spent the bulk of his career in corporate finance at RBC Dominion Securities, then in biotech with Lehman Brothers in London and San Francisco before coming home to work at what's now known as Canaccord Genuity prior to joining Mr. Chalmers.
And Derek Webb started on the Street in CIBC World Markets' M&A team, then moved to Canaccord for more than a decade before coming to BayFront. The team also includes veteran investor relations executive Joanna Longo, who came out of Equicom after the IR firm was sold to TMX Group. Mr. Chalmers is a veteran of Cormark Securities, Canaccord Capital and Macquaire Group.
In just six months, the BayFront team have been part of 18 financings, a blistering start, and all for companies few investors have encountered. The mantra is to find "emerging leaders" in resources and other growth sectors, and sell these stories to institutional investors who set aside a little mad money for growth stocks. In Mr. Berry's case, that approach means tapping deep ties to the U.S. hedge fund crowd.
These individuals all used to work at Canadian dealers that opted to go up market, in search of larger deals that could support a bigger investment bank. BayFront is staying proudly down market, leading small deals for growth companies, and keeping the photocopying to a minimum.
Nomura mining for talent
Japanese investment dealers spent the better part of a decade in a funk, doing very little business in Canadian markets as head office focused on fixing the domestic franchise.
Nomura, Japan's largest brokerage, may be breaking out of that slump, as there was speculation Monday that the dealer landed a top investment banker in the mining space.
Bloomberg is reporting that the chairman of Deutsche Bank AG's Canadian securities unit, Thomas Barber, is heading for Nomura.
Mr. Barber is known as a globe-trotting deal maker at resource companies, with enviable industry relationships. Prior to working for Deutsche Bank, he was a senior banker at Credit Suisse Canada and Morgan Stanley.
CIBC snags Michael Cioffi
There's a new head of the equity trading desk at CIBC World Markets in New York, as RBC Dominion Securities veteran Michael Cioffi joins the firm.
Mr. Cioffi was named on Tuesday as managing director and New York-based head of U.S. cash equities sales trading at the investment dealer arm of CIBC. He will start in September, after a gardening leave.
Mr. Cioffi had the same role at RBC Dominion in New York. The head of CIBC World's equity desk in Toronto, James Beattie, also spent the first part of his career at RBC Dominion.
More tech for Thompson
National Bank Financial promoted from within to fill out its coverage of Canadian technology stocks, with veteran analyst Kris Thompson taking on the wireless and software stocks, in addition to his work on communications equipment manufacturers.
Mr. Thompson joined National Bank Financial two years ago, and he is covering a hardware sector that lost a major domestic name when Nortel went down.
With his new responsibilities, Mr. Thompson will be adding coverage of widely followed stocks such as Research In Motion, CGI Group, Open Text, and MacDonald Dettwiler. He is picking up coverage of a sector that was covered by Richard Tse, who announced last week he is moving to Cormark Securities.
See Andrew Willis's Streetwise Blog at ReportonBusiness.com
