Bless you, Harris

TSX / LSE Merger Part 14

The frenetic folks at Bloomberg did a great job adding to the TSX/LSE merger debate last Friday. They found a real live small and mid cap investment banking expert to go on the record regarding the very issue I’ve been yammering about: will the proposed merger improve a TSX-listed company’s ability to access capital?

Here are some choices quote from the piece by Doug Alexander. The industry expert is GMP CEO Harris Fricker:

“If you ask me why London wants to do the deal, it’s a no- brainer,” said Fricker, whose Toronto-based brokerage is the second-biggest block trader on Canada’s main stock exchange. The LSE’s junior market, AIM, “is broken and London is not a major participant in the global resource game.”

“No one’s commenting on the biggest fact of this deal, and that is: Why a highly viable exchange is dinner versus diner,” Fricker said in a phone interview today. “Why aren’t these guys buying the London Stock Exchange?”

“We totally understand the merits of the deal,” Fricker said. “We are struggling with the concept of it deepening capital formation or availability to the small and mid-cap portion of the market, which is really the heart and soul of the TMX.”

“The TMX over the last decade has become highly viable as a small to mid-cap resource-based exchange,” he said. “Let’s be very concise and guarded in anything that might upset that apple cart.”

Bless you, Harris. I was feeling rather lonely on the “access to capital” point.

MRM