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Arden Partners celebrate second corporate broking win

The stock market ended another day in negative territory yesterday, but it was not all doom and gloom among those trying to earn a livelihood from the system.

Over at Birmingham stock broker Arden Partners they were celebrating their second corporate broking win since setting up in November.

Coleshill-based floor covering distributor Headlam has turned its back on Old Mutual Securities - now Arbuthnot - in favour of its smaller rival, which is selling itself on its "whiter-than-white" approach to research and equity sales.

Headlam joins car dealership Pendragon as the bedrock of Arden's fledging corporate finance business, helping to confirm the start-up's credentials in the mid to small cap arena.

Arden equities salesmen Jonathan Keeling says the firm had not planned to have any corporate brokerships in its first three months of trading, allowing him to utter that increasingly under-used phase - "it has come in ahead of our expectations".

Arden is also benefiting from the larger investment houses cyclical, boom/bust attitude to making markets in and researching small market cap shares. The weak stock market has put pressure on their high fixed cost broking model and many have scaled back their operations, with some like ING and Deutsche closing down their small cap teams altogether.

This should mean that institutional investors looking for independent research into smaller listed companies (we're talking £250 million and below although at the peak of the boom £1 billion and below was small cap for some) have a smaller number of financially secure firms to turn to. Arden, Arbuthnot, Williams de Broe and Collins Stewart will be among them.