I think Dan is the founder, and from my short acquaintance with him when I traded part-time at SwiftTrade Campus, he is a nice guy, to say the least.
LuisHK, Newedge PB probably has the lowest minimum capital requirements among the professional shops. I was mentioning Nomura because the question specifically addressed Japanese equity short inventory. I doubt Newedge will get you reasonable borrow at justifiable rates. They might just go to the likes of Nomura and mark up their rates before offering to you. Instinet is just an electronic buy-side broker platform and has nothing to do with lending books. Anyone wanting to short would still have to go through Nomura's lending book. Newedge has a HK representation last time I checked. Not sure of similar setups that are having offices in HK. Have you talked to IB's institutional desk?
Really you should check out Nomura. Their PB offer looked pretty ok when I checked around Summer last year. Depending on average traded volume I remember execution cost between 0.55bps - 2.00 bps (pure DMA, NXT Connect and NXT Direct) but for those rates you would have to make them the custodian as well I think, but you get a pretty decent leverage/margin and financing structure. I think they target higher frequency setups with that as you would have to at least turn over 50 or 70 mln USD notional to qualify for those rates. Sorry I forget the exact numbers. As I am not sure about your needs and how much you look to trade I am not sure this is helpful at all.
Thanks for the info. Yeah, I'm nowhere near that at the moment but it's good to know there are good alternatives out there.
no question about Nomura or Daiwa's lending books, but I am interested in a broker open to a $500k - $1m account size.
Yes, Newedge, Abn, Nomura and IB have offices in HK, probably more shops as well I don't know about. I haven't spoken with IB institutional desk, as I was more looking to move elsewhere but might end up calling them. Newedge seems to have the lower requirements in terms of trading volume (100k commission a year) but my impression is they are looking to step away from individual traders (even trading through a corporation) they'd rather work with a company having a compliance officer or a risk manager. Abn definetely does, ABN also mentionned over 300k yearly commissions and connectivity costs. At the moment looking to trade around 3-4 million per day on various markets -mostly european and north americans- could increase teh volume with better rates, holding usually from 1 day to several weeks.
I hear you. It's a general trend that larger shops look to rid themselves of accounts that do not generate enough profits for them. After all we work in a completely idiotic industry. Sorry for being so cynical but after having worked for over 15 years in it and having witnessed how PB desks virtually threw in a blow job for free for onboarding just another small trading account and now completely reversing this trend like Ibanks reverse all their decisions in perfect 5-6 year cycles, it's hard not to become cynical.
Well you can short it's just that the inventory is not that rich. I doubt you find a better broker for your specified account size. Japanese retail brokers might but they charge an arm and a leg in commissions.