Deutsche Bank's week from hell; Wall Street's most sophisticated, high-speed traders are growing hot on fintech investing

Dear Readers,

I'm Meredith, the new finance editor at Business Insider, and I'm subbing in for Olivia this week. This was my first week on the job, and what a busy week it was!

The ax that was hanging over Deutsche Bank finally fell. On Sunday, the bank said it was firing 18,000 people in a massive restructuring that would see it dump equities trading entirely. The next day we were on the ground to report what was going on outside the bank's 60 Wall St. office.

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Insiders around Wall Street struggled to understand Deutsche Bank's move, and many said the businesses that survived the cuts, like research and equity capital markets, didn't add up to a compelling future for the bank. Deutsche Bank didn't say much about its plans publicly, but we learned it told a hedge-fund client details about who would be spared in research departments around the world.

As for those who were laid off, insiders told us prospects to land a new gig may not be great and that most of the top talent had already been poached out of the bank before Sunday.

Deutsche Bank's week from hell didn't end with job cuts. In fact, the bank's list of regulatory headaches is growing. The Department of Justice, which had investigated Goldman Sachs' dealings with the Malaysian fund 1MDB, is also now delving deeper into an ex-Goldman exec who later went on to Deutsche Bank, reports said. Also on Thursday, another report said senior managers had overruled compliance-staff concerns about the bank's dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, who is facing charges of sex trafficking.

It's hard to imagine that we had time to write about anything other than Deutsche Bank, but as you can tell from the list below, the team also churned out excellent reads on CBD, chatbots, and more.

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Don't forget about our annual Rising Stars of Wall Street list. You can read more about the process here and submit your nominations through this form.

And for those of you interested in the cannabis business, our star reporter Jeremy Berke has a new newsletter called Cultivated, which will give you an inside look at the deals, trends, and personalities driving the multibillion-dollar global cannabis boom.

You can sign up for that here.

Thanks for reading!
Meredith

'Some of the conversations we had in 2006 we are having again': Bain and Carlyle are teaming up in rare deal that private equity has been reluctant to do since the financial crisis

Bain Capital and The Carlyle Group have teamed up to buy the German light-bulb maker Osram Licht for $3.8 billion in a rare instance of private-equity giants coinvesting.

In the first half of 2019, there were 107 deals with more than one private-equity investor, down 57% from the same period last year.

The deal, which will give Osram a capital injection after it issued warnings to investors about a weak light market, comes at a time when private-equity firms have been reticent to team up with rivals for large transactions, instead looking to their own clients for capital, including pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.

READ MORE HERE >>

Morgan Stanley is rolling out an AI chatbot to research clients early next year. Wall Street thinks the tech could save $8 billion annually.

Morgan Stanley has developed an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot to help its workers sift through the bank's research.

AskResearch was originally created for internal use by analysts and sales employees, but the bank plans to offer it to clients in early 2020 via a mobile app.

The chatbot is the latest effort by Wall Street to create AI-powered virtual assistants to cut down on menial work for employees and clients.

READ MORE HERE >>

Wall Street's most sophisticated, high-speed traders are growing hot on fintech investing. Execs from 5 firms explain how they find their best investments.

Electronic trading firms, known for their ability to quickly move between positions, have shown an increasing interest toward financial-technology investing.

Some firms have gone as far as setting up completely separate funds to make deals.

Business Insider spoke with executives from five electronic trading firms about their strategies toward fintech investing.

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The hedge-fund industry has a problem with managers cherry-picking performance. One group wants to stop that.

Hedge-fund performance has been underwhelming. An influential professional organization has overhauled its reporting standards in order to bring more funds into the fold, but adoption would force portfolio managers to give up tactics to make returns look better.

The notoriously opaque hedge-fund industry has never widely adopted any broad guidelines for calculating performance figures. Managers can overstate returns by selective reporting, observers say, and many are supportive of centralized, transparent rules.

It's another example of the transformation the once niche industry has made into a more institutional business.

READ MORE HERE >>

Quote of the week:

"It was a s--- show on Monday, it's a s--- show today" — a uBiome employee this week after the troubled startup laid off half its staff in the wake of an FBI raid as part of an investigation into the company's billing practices.

In markets:

In tech news:

Other good stories from around the newsroom: