Good morning,

Melbourne Cup. The race that stops the nation but not the nation’s investment banks.

Street Talk did a ring round to a bunch top Sydney players on Monday and didn’t find any hosting an official event for Cup Day.

“We’ll probably have the TVs on on the trading floor,” one said. “The market doesn’t stop for the race,” another said, noting the Reserve Bank could steal the limelight, making its rate announcement 30 minutes before the starting gun.

Barrenjoey is understood to have taken a pragmatic approach, recognising that race has become a polarising issue. A sign of the times?

That’s not to say bankers won’t be out for a tipple after work — or taking punts.

Tips for the big day are coming in thick and fast.

All but two economists predict the RBA is on track for a rate rise later today to 4.35 per cent.

Meanwhile, Macquarie’s quant team has given itself another opportunity to call the wrong horse, tipping Without A Fight to win.

Like all bad best-man speeches, it has also put its faith in AI to come up with an alternative winner, with PunterGPT selecting Gold Trip for the win – a form of hedging its bets, if you will.

Last year, Macquarie backed Deauville Legend. The horse came in fourth at Flemington.

“Surrounded by echoes of last year’s disappointment, the Macquarie team sat in sombre silence contemplating our future as once-a-year horse race tipsters,” the bank’s head of global quant research, John Conomos, told clients on Monday afternoon.

“After early successes, the weight of years of dashed hopes hung heavy and it seemed our once-keen instincts for horse racing predictions had dulled.”

Giddy up,

• Last stop for Ventura’s $1 billion sale; binding bids in
• JPMorgan tower: Blackstone’s 32-level headache on Castlereagh Street
• NSW Land Registry auction revs up; bids due mid-Dec
• Westpac tipped to seek $1.5 billion for new hybrid deal; hires big syndicate
• JPMorgan managing director Annabelle Mooney takes her leave
• Major Whispir shareholders sell down as Soprano lobs bid

• EIG hits out at AustralianSuper as Origin takeover battle fires up, writes Angela MacDonald-Smith.
• Goldman Sachs Group is revamping how its asset-management teams get rewarded, boosting their payouts when funds outperform, Bloomberg reports.
• Brookfield Asset Management raised $US26 billion in the third quarter and said it’s on track to bring in close to $US150 billion in fresh capital this year, Bloomberg reports.

85 Castlereagh had a book value of $835 million last June on a 4.38 per cent capitalisation rate. Sources told Street Talk Blackstone would struggle to find someone to value the property at any less than 6 per cent in the current market.

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