Rule Financial’s Hedge Fund clients will benefit if the European bond dealing organisation MTS SpA adopts plans to grant third-party-access to its B2B technology.

This should give Rule’s clients admittance to the traditionally inter-dealer Eurozone government bond market, in which trading levels reach €90 billion per day, or €4 trillion (€4,000,000,000,000) per year.

At a recent meeting MTS’s Third Party Access committee was instructed to formulate practical proposals following a generally supportive reaction to an initial report.

      “This is excellent news.“ said Steve Swindon, head of the Hedge Fund practice at Rule Financial. “The Euro bond market is enormous but until now it’s been something of a closed shop with only banks being able to take advantage of its scale. We anticipate a lot of interest once MTS finally opens the doors.”

Allowing Direct Market Access (DMA) or order routing will potentially increase market liquidity and expand the profitability for hedge funds, with electronically traded volumes potentially increasing by 15% to 25%.

Rule Financial has wide experience of building connectivity in such trading environments and can give Hedge Fund clients flexibility in the way they access liquidity via MTS. We also provide the expertise to offer linkage to common hedge fund trading systems such as Sophis Value/Risque and Beauchamp FundManager.

For more information  please contact Steve Swindon at info@rulefinancial.com
or call 020 7826 4444.

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Time was when golden mimosa was an exotic plant you bought in a florist in January, or admired on a winter holiday in the South of France or Cornwall. No longer. The little puffy balls of yellow flowers are moving north and east.

The Mimosa Meter registers Acacia dealbata in London and in sheltered gardens all the way up to north Humberside. Since it will tolerate a few degrees of frost for short periods, it might be worth planting now anywhere in the lowlands of England and Wales, That is, if this past winter is part of a pattern, as the scientists tells us it is, rather than an aberration.

Changing climate, we are told, means stronger winds, particularly in autumn and spring, together with wet, mild winters that produce only the odd, short-lived episode of snow and no sustained periods of freezing weather, less incidence of spring frosts and then long, hot, dry summers. What happens, in these changed circumstances, to existing gardens and plantings, based very largely on reliably frost-hardy trees shrubs herbaceous perennials and bulbs; the kind of garden for which we are particularly known across the world?

It seems to me that there are a number of relatively easy things we can do to mitigate the worst effects of climate change on them. We should plant everything small, especially trees, so that they are well-anchored by an extensive root system in the soil and able to withstand gales. We should lighten heavy soils with grit and bark chippings, so that plant roots aren’t sitting in sopping soil through the winter.

For those plants which need moisture in summer such as South African bulbs, we should mulch the soil heftily in spring, so that it stays moist despite a beating sun in July; in the case of frost-tender plants, the mulching should be done in the autumn to prevent the roots from freezing. We should plant shelter beds, and, if that interferes with the view, then internal shelters using hedging plants. Northern European perennials and blackcurrants, which need substantial winter chilling, should be plants in the coldest part of the garden if possible.

You may wonder whether it is worth that bother to maintain our hold on traditional types of garden making, using well-tried plants with which we’ve become comfortable. The alternative, however is to risk a mish-mash of conflicting styles. Just because we can get something to grow doesn’t mean we have to. I shall refrain from planting a mimosa yet awhile.

Reproduced with the kind permission of The Spectator from “The Climes They Are A-Changing” by Ursula Buchan, as featured in The Spectator Guide to Gardening, supplement, 28.iv.07 

As we sit here in the Square Mile, with the lights blazing away all day, Blackberries, mobiles and iPods on charge, monitors displaying screensavers, TVs on standby, photocopiers whirring away to themselves, all of us generally burning up energy with insane abandon, as if it were completely free and everlasting, “like there was no tomorrow”, it might be an idea to stop for moment and consider whether tomorrow deserves better from us.

Could Rule Financial make a serious dent in its overheads by consuming less energy?  Can we bring ourselves even to find out whether it could function just as smoothly with fewer electrical machines permanently switched on, fewer pints of water boiled unnecessarily, and fewer trips in the lifts?

Supposing it proved an efficient, cost-effective, healthy and all-round ‘Good Idea’ to adopt such a strategy, why not tell other people what we’ve done, and even introduce it as a permanent fixture in Rule’s advice to its clients?

Specifically, could the company become an example for other organisations in the financial services industry to follow?

And if so, why not throughout the City?  …and other cities.  Paris recently switched off the Eiffel Tower - for five whole minutes -  in response to an eco-appeal (in typically Gallic style, there was a huge row beforehand about how much EXTRA electricity would be used up by the power surge when they were switched back on).

So could Rule Financial be the butterfly wing which eventually causes all the great conurbations on Earth to switch off the lights when they don’t need them? With the company actively looking to New York, perhaps our initial USA PR offerings could form a headline-catching appeal to turn the Big Apple from red to green.

THIS PAGE INVITES CONTRIBUTIONS ON GREENISH ISSUES FROM ANY SOURCE.

Aim them towards  riccooper@rulefinancial.com

David Little writes… 

Some suggested reading on this topic might include:-

“Inconvenient Truths”  by Al Gore.
“The Revenge of Gaia” by James Lovelock.
“Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning.” by George Monbiot.
“How to Live a Low-carbon Life: The Individual’s Guide to Stopping Climate Change,” by Chris Goodall.

And finally, if you ask e-Bay to sniff out an “Electrisave meter” you’ll discover a gadget which may cost you £60 now,  but will save you a fortune in the long run when connected to the logic nodes in your brain.

MICHAEL GORDON’s appointment as Head of Business Consulting at Rule Financial enhances the depth and breadth of services Rule is capable of offering the financial services sector. His knowledge and recent work involving retail banking, cards and payments effectively adds several new and keenly-anticipated strings to the company’s already powerful bow.  

“With a combination of universal banks and investment banks among Rule’s clients, there are great opportunities for us to offer additional competencies and a wider range of services across all divisions of the bank.” he explains. “This will accelerate the development of Rule’s Business Consulting practice and I’m delighted to be leading it.”

In 20 years of consulting, preceded by an early career as a distinguished academic at Leicester University, Michael Gordon’s clients have included ABN AMRO, HBoS, Eagle Star, HSBC, Invesco, LloydsTSB, Marks & Spencer Financial Services, Mellon Bank, Prudential (UK), Royal Bank of Scotland, Yorkshire Building Society and Visa International. At Cap Gemini he was responsible for services delivered to banking clients in the UK and Ireland, with a £45m P&L responsibility, and led their UK Banking and Securities Consultancy Practice and the Group’s Global Banking Centre of Excellence.

While an academic he also advised a variety of public sector bodies including: The European Commission, The Department of Health and Social Security, The Royal College of General Practitioners and The British Library.