UBS Global Asset Management today announced the launch of its new UBS Fixed Income Opportunities Fund, an opportunistic fixed income strategy that seeks returns with low correlation to traditional equity and fixed income markets. The Fund seeks to outperform 3-month LIBOR by 3%, net of fund ordinary operating expenses, over rolling five-year time horizons.
Three employees of UBS AG have been fined a total of HK$1.8 million for negligence in handling a client's trade orders in February 2008. The SFC said the client, who faced margin calls with UBS from UBS, decided to transfer part of his portfolio at UBS to another account at Morgan Stanley to ease his margin position with UBS. Instead, the three UBS employees executed a series of on-exchange matched sales and purchases with the client's account executive and her assistants at Morgan Stanley.
UBS said it would buy Brazilian brokerage Link Investimentos for $112 million. The purchase will serve to expand UBS's wealth and asset management businesses in the region.
UBS will add 15-20 wealth-management relationship managers in Taiwan in 2010 to increase its business on the island. The company's wealth management operation in Taiwan currently has 210 staff. Taiwan was one of the few profitable private wealth management markets in Asia for UBS in 2009.
Oswald Grübel comes for Marcel Rohner as new CEO
Oswald Grübel comes for Marcel Rohner
UBS announced it might cut as many as 4500 jobs in the next few weeks.
UBS will have to pay 5000,000 euros for alleged market rigging during Parmalat's 2003 collapse.
On August 12, UBS announced its results for the second quarter of 2008, which included a net loss of $331 million on write downs of $5.1 billion. On the same day, UBS anounced that it would buy back $18.6 billion of auction-rate securities from its clients in response to governmental investigations. Also, UBS disclosed plans to separate its wealth management business from its investment banking and asset management segments.
Massachusetts securities regulators filed a civil suit against UBS for its role in the collapse of the credit markets. The charges claim that UBS's investment bank and brokerage divisions misstated the risk of investing in certain securities and actively tried to hide the falling values from investors.
The Swiss central bank demanded that investment banks UBS and Credit Suisse maintain higher capital stocks. Given the ongoing credit crunch, the central bank believes that current capital requirements are too low to ensure that the firms can continue operations as normal. UBS and Credit Suisse are a huge part of the Swiss economy, so ensuring their viability is of interest to the government as well.
After a damaging case involving a UBS banker helping U.S. clients to avoid taxes emerged, U.S. authorities began investigating other UBS clients. Feeling pressure from both U.S. authorities and E.U. officials, UBS may divulge privacy information on 20,000 of its American clients.
The Bear Stearns fire sale to JPMorgan rattles investors in UBS, the bank with, at that point, the largest cumulative writedown due to subprime mortgages. The crucial question is whether UBS could be brought down by a similar run on the bank.
UBS's lost almost twice as much money as the median loss expected by analysts, largely because writedowns on US mortgage backed securities rose to $14 billion.
Following write-downs of over $3bn in its third-quarter earnings release, UBS announced on December 10, 2007, that it would take another $10bn write-down for the fourth quarter. The firm also announced that it would issue $11.5bn in new equities to sell to investors from Singapore and the Middle East in an attempt to shore up capital.
