But from the stories I hear from my still-active banker friends, there’s no such thing as busy “seasons” anymore. It’s just busy. With few Asian bank teams adding staff to cover the sheer onslaught of fresh deals coming in, and an equally tamped down approach to asset manager staff hiring here in Asia, it’s a wonder that deal-day fumbles don’t happen more often.
Over drinks at the Captain’s Bar last week, one bond banker friend was laughing about what a regular occurrence it has become to receive the wrong calls from investors on busy deal days. Normally it’s easy enough to sort out quickly that the caller has reached out to the wrong bank, but not always.
Recently, the bond market was in a tizzy with nine dollar deals out on one day. Most of the deals were high-yield corporate trades coming from China, and inevitably looked quite similar. The chap told me that his team had more than one call that day with orders being placed for the two deals they were working on, only for the investor to call back frantically soon after to say that they’d placed the wrong order for the wrong deal.
Fortunately, the investors figured out their errors before the trades wrapped up and allocations went out. Who can blame them though, when all these call dates and trades sound so alike!