James von Moltke - Deutsche Bank AG
Management
Sure, Kian. It's James. So, I'll try to – there's a lot in those questions, I'll try to be as brief as I can. First of all, on costs, our year-to-date track record has been to be down ex-FX in adjusted costs by, call it, low-single digits. All we're really trying to do is indicate that last year's fourth quarter, given the compensation decisions we made, is, call it, a tougher relative comparable. And so, while the decisions are still outstanding in terms of comp for the year, it's that comparison we wanted to draw your attention to. In terms of market share in equities, as you saw on the slide, we're down 16% year-on-year. There are really three businesses that we break that into, one is cash equities and we were up in that market, including a gain, although without the gain, we were still up, and then Prime Finance and Derivatives. Let me take those two in order. Prime Finance, as we've talked about in the past, we've been very focused on regaining the client balances that were lost last year's fourth quarter and that we've worked to regain this year. As we say on the slide, we're pleased to report that now we've surpassed the September 30 level in client balances, although the average was still lower in the third quarter than it was in last year's third quarter. And we're also recovering the margin loss that we'd suffered earlier this year. So, I think an important point we want to bring out there is that the underlying drivers of revenues in that segment of the equity business are now regaining traction and we would expect that to have an impact on the future. Obviously, in equities, client engagement and cash derivatives and prime is a key feature. We'll sort of swim with the market in terms of how overall equity market performance plays out. And the last item is Equity Derivatives and they're in a very low volatility market. We've maintained, I think, a conservative risk posture and both volumes and that conservative risk posture have dampened our revenues. If you put all that together, I think there's some reason to believe we can regain momentum in that business, especially in Prime, but we're dependent in part on levels of activity in the market coming back.