Nomura to boost rates and FX trading units, sees more market volatility

[TOKYO] Japan’s Nomura Holdings plans to beef up its interest rate and currency trading operations globally, believing increased market volatility will lift demand, a senior executive said.

The push reflects growing doubts around the longevity of the current equities bull run. When markets become more volatile, interest rate and foreign exchange products typically perform better, as clients hedge risk and rebalance their positions, generating higher trading flows.

“Global equity markets are at all-time highs. US markets – and within US markets, a narrow set of stocks – have dominated as drivers of value,” Christopher Willcox, the head of the firm’s wholesale division, said.

“You would be wise to assume that can’t go on forever and that at some point, there’s an adjustment,” he said.

Nomura declined to provide details on how much hiring would take place or current staff numbers for those operations.

New hires

But he noted that the group appointed a new head of US rates in August – Moritz Westhoff, formerly of Bank of America – and a new co-head of its FX and emerging markets business, David Leigh, who joined from Deutsche Bank last November.

More personnel and capital will be directed to those teams, said Willcox, a former JP Morgan Asset Management CEO who joined Nomura in 2021 and became head of wholesale a year later.

Nomura’s interest rate and exchange rate operations form the bulk of its macro products business, which has made up around 30 per cent of the wholesale division’s revenue in recent years. In the past business year, the division’s revenue topped one trillion yen (S$8.7 billion).

The push also reflects Nomura’s efforts to build more diverse sources of income, given that its wholesale unit’s performance has seen wild swings along with market conditions in the past.

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“We view the macro business as counter-cyclical. In the global financial crisis, it was everyone’s rates business that made all the money at the time when their securitised products businesses were shut down,” Willcox said.

The securitisation of mortgage debt into financial instruments was among the core causes of the 2007 to 2009 global financial crisis.

Willcox also said that Nomura’s advisory business is likely to perform better in the second half of the year compared to the first half, as the public listing market in the US has picked up and there is pent-up M&A demand in Japan.

Deals and capital raisings had been held back by uncertainty caused by US President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, though this has eased somewhat with the signing of some trade agreements between the US and other countries.

The wholesale division does not have planned any major acquisitions along the lines of Nomura’s US$1.8 billion purchase of Macquarie’s US and European public asset management businesses. But it is looking to diversify its business lines in areas where Nomura has existing expertise to make money regardless of market ups and downs.

Earlier in September, it launched a US commercial real estate platform with a team hired from Barclays, which Willcox expects will contribute hundreds of millions of US dollars to the top line over the next few years.

“We are asking where logically we can extend pre-existing expertise into new zones,” Willcox said.

“And there’s lots of them, it’s not like we are running out of things to do.” REUTERS