Summit Notebook

How to gum up an exchange merger: salt water

It’s a puzzle M&A bankers and corporate executives have been trying to solve for years: how far from your home market can an acquisition take place and ultimately stumble over cultural differences? It’s a question that looms large as quintessentially Italian automaker Fiat prepares to swallow up Chrysler – inventor of the K-car and the minivan – and which reportedly haunts St Louis-based employees of Anheuser Busch in the aftermath of their company’s takeover by the penny pinching Belgians and Brazilians at InBev.

Gary Katz, CEO of Deutsche Boerse unit International Securities Exchange, insisted during his appearance at the Reuters Exchanges and Trading Summit that all has been sweetness and light since the Germans assumed control of the upstart American options exchange and that there has been “nearly zero turnover” since the takeover.

But Thomas Kloet, Chief Executive of Canadian exchange powerhouse TMX, was one of several executives at the summit who insisted that cross border mergers can often be a recipe for disaster and that the ideal mergers are “domestic roll-ups” like CME Group’s takeover of Nymex and the Chicago Board of Trade or indeed TSX Group’s takeover of the Montreal Exchange, which created TMX.

Implicitly criticizing some of the first-ever cross border deals in the sector like NYSE’s merger with Euronext, Kloet said: “there are significant regulatory differences that make cross border mergers pretty difficult to do, especially when they start passing over salt water, so to speak.”

Listen to the attached recording to hear the former ABN AMRO senior managing director’s ruminations on exchange M&A in full.

Audio – Everybody loves a winner in Vegas, baby!

It seems that any sentence about Las Vegas, the people who work there or the stocks of the companies that run the big casinos ends better with the word “baby”. It’s almost like you can hear Frank saying it to Dino on their way into some smoky, after-hours cocktail party.

So, even though Bill Lerner, casino and gaming analyst at Deutsche Bank didn’t exactly end his comments on casino stock picks like Sinatra might have … well, it’s Vegas, baby!

Lerner, speaking at the Reuters Travel and Leisure Summit in New York, spoke extensively about the stocks in the gaming sector and identified the ones he thinks have the best chance at near- and longer-term success.

Lerner was one of the featured speakers at the summit, which continues through Wednesday in our New York headquarters. The Summit program is in its fifth year, and in 2009 will include top-level executives from  industries and sectors including everything from Infrastructure; to Mining; to Investing in India, China, Japan and Russia; to Food and Beverages.