Lehman-Merrill: What Was Your Reaction?

I think I’m still in shock over the weekend's events. I finally adjusted to a world without Bear Stearns, but I can’t really fathom that the capital markets also will be without Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

Beyond experiencing disbelief, the industry was deeply saddened that the credit crisis has taken a toll on so many good firms and good people. Merrill Lynch has 60,000 employees and Lehman 25,000 -- what will become of them?

We know there are certain people at these firms who are responsible for the lapse in risk management that led to their losses, but those are only a few people in a few departments. The overwhelming majority of workers at Lehman and Merrill had no part in the fall of these firms. Rather, they are hard-working people who have contributed a great deal to the electronification and transformation of the markets over the past few years.

In fact, many of these people have been good friends to Advanced Trading and helped us during our launch for the selfless reason of helping the markets share information.

I spent a lot of time on the phone yesterday talking to traders and analysts at various firms, trying to take their pulse on what has happened. I asked how trading desks were coping, what it was like trading yesterday, what they thought these events would mean to the financial markets as a whole, and how Wall Street would reshape itself.

As one buy-side trader put it, “A lot of things are going through our minds. This is about a lot of professional friendships. This is a people business. Despite how electronic the world has become, there are still people behind the business. There is an air of sadness -- this is the death of businesses and the death of careers.”

The general consensus was that an event like this brings the concept of vendor risk to the forefront. If a buy-side firm was a LehmanLive customer or used Real Tick as its front end, then the events of the past few days would leave its desk in disarray.

As far as the algorithms and dark pools, most agreed that there is a tremendous amount of redundancy among these tools and the loss of some won’t have a major impact. The buy-side trader said, “Are we going to miss HYDRA? No, but we will miss the creative inspiration behind it.” He explained that having fewer algorithms and dark pools may actually make trading easier.

“As far as liquidity goes, liquidity is transient. If you were buying or selling through Lehman, you’ll do it through someone else,“ he added.

This is one buy-side trader’s opinion (one who requested anonymity). We’d like to hear what you think.

What was your reaction? How did the news affect your trading desk? Was it chaos or just a minor disruption? Were you reliant on some of Lehman’s or Merrill’s technology or algorithms? What are your concerns going forward?

Share whatever thoughts you would like to share on these events, whether in one line, one paragraph or one page. I will post them on Advanced Trading.com -- with your name and photo, or anonymously. E-mail me a kmassaro@techweb.com. Put "Market Reaction" in the subject line.

Here are some of the reactions we've gathered so far: