Morning Coffee: Barclays junior reported boss for sweary emails, weak joke. What makes Citadel Securities special

When is a joke not a joke, and when is the teller of the non-joke liable to be fired for its expression? A recent court case concerning an equity derivatives middle office guy at Barclays offered clarification on all these points.

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

The clarity, contained in the judgment seems to be that a joke isn't a joke when it makes light of regulatory issues at work. And that you can be fired for telling these jokes a) if you haven't told many jokes before and b) your junior thinks for a bit and then reports you to a bigger boss. 

This was the fate of Mathew Humphrey, who had a long and maybe not so illustrious career as an assistant vice president "equity derivatives middle office" at Barclays in London until he was fired for a joke last year. Humphrey's junior still seems to be at Barclays.

Humphrey's joke, which followed his realisation that a client had been overcharged due to a problem with a formula, was included in this email. We've highlighted it in case you miss it.

"I'm half tempted to just correct this quarter and move on … Save ourselves the fucking headache… Yeah-this is what we'll do… I'll automate the formula… And send a mail telling you to adjust the cells…. Otherwise-wait until one of us leaves then open the can of worms then :)… Ok-just send a mail, idea is we update the formula-on all 3 tabs making the spreadsheet more robust".

It is not very funny. In its entirety, the email reads more as if Humphrey is trying to be over-familiar and friendly with his junior in the style of a large and friendless child in the playground. Either way, the junior waited for a few hours, thought for a bit, and then messaged a bigger boss to say that he felt that he had been "coerced to conceal the issue."

And with that, Humphrey's career was over. You have been warned.

Separately, Citadel Securities may not be paying as much as Jane Street, but it's just won the Risk Awards for being the best flow market maker of the year, and president Jim Esposito has been explaining what makes Citadel Securities so especially good at this. 

Firstly, Esposito says Citadel Securities doesn't have any distractions like "long-dated derivatives or financing activities" and that this allows it to "be there" for clients during volatile markets. 

Secondly, Risk says Citadel Securities is incredibly good at netting. While banks have "invisible fractures" and can't offset risks between businesses, Citadel Securities "calculates exposure across multiple business lines and product sets – also across both client and proprietary positions."

Thirdly, Matt Culek, Citadel Securities' COO, contributed some words about a "buffer at the top of house" which he said the firm can allocate on a temporary basis. Banks can't do this, added Esposito - who came from Goldman Sachs and should know. "Financing activities tend to be long-dated trades and capital-intensive. Banks’ capital allocation is often less fluid for those reasons."

And lastly, Citadel Securities has proprietary technology which doesn't break. It's also poached all sorts of people from banks to work there. Clients love it. Citadel Securities "provide an incredible amount of liquidity," enthuses one.

Meanwhile...

“I misjudged the situation and regret making the joke. But what I’m being accused of has been taken much further than a flippant joke,” Matthew Humphrey said in a witness statement prepared for the August trial. (Bloomberg)

HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery would like to say that he is a hard man. "Some decisions are unpopular, but then I wasn’t appointed in this role to be popular. You have to take some difficult decisions . . . We have to be ruthless." He also says: “Those few areas where we are visibly not [in the top 20], we have to take ruthless decisions and say we shouldn’t be doing that.” (Financial Times) 

HSBC's new chairman is Brendan Nelson, a former KPMG accountant who doesn't look ruthless at all. (Bloomberg) 

Andrew Philipp was Citadel's CFO. Now he's Schonfeld's co-president. Philipp's old team will be reporting to Citadel's longserving COO Gerald Beeson and Citadel will be hiring a replacement. (Business Insider)  

The global head of prime financing is leaving Standard Chartered. (Risk) 

Citadel is up 8.3% this year. Balyasny is up 15.3%. ExodusPoint is up 15.6%. (Business Insider)  

Profit per partner at BDO is now a mere £589k ($780,000). Last year, it was £681k. (Bloomberg) 

Rothschild hired Andrew Richards, who was latterly co-head of financial sponsors for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Barclays. (Financial News) 

Citi hired Chris Schuville from HSBC for investment grade bond trading. (Bloomberg) 

People want to be accountants again. It's a nice steady career. (Business Insider) 

If every employee at law firm Shoosmiths uses Copilot four times a day, they'll get a £770 bonus. (Bloomberg) 

Michael Burry says: "This bubble looks an awful lot like.com bubble, which is not really.com bubble. It was a data transmission bubble. There was a huge build out of fiber, and a huge fiber, needed routers, and routers needed fiber, and it just blew up. So the market peak was in March. 10 of 2000 Cisco grew 55% that year." (Pushkin)

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.