Hunting for a profitable equities business

JIM FORESE IS no equities banker. He’s never worked in equities before, let alone traded a stock or managed an IPO. And he probably never thought he would. But at the end of May he was promoted from his role running Citigroup’s emerging markets local finance to become global head of the bank’s equities division.

“That’s a real wake-up call for all of us,” says a senior equities banker at a rival firm. He’s not referring to one of the rumours about why Forese displaced former co-heads Robert DiFazio and Arthur Hyde, both career-long equities bankers: that rumour ponders whether it was the loss on the Nextel-Motoral exchangeable earlier in the year that led to the change.