Morning Coffee: Barclays' bankers' "mental" moment. The other way to make money from trading

It's hot in London, and if you work in M&A for Barclays in Canary Wharf, the air conditioning will make no difference. A summer deal is underway and Barclays' bankers are in the most sweaty situation.

A Barclays team comprising Adrian Beidas, the co-head of UK investment banking, Nicola Tennent, a managing director (MD) in corporate broking, and Benjamin Metzger, Barclays' New York-based head of transportation banking, are representing Apollo in its "mental" bid for EasyJet, revealed on Friday morning. 

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The Apollo bid is not mental because it makes no sense. It is mental because it was a surprise. “Mental - no one saw that coming,” a mysterious person close to the deal declared to the Financial Times. Until Friday, it was thought that Castlelake was buying EasyJet for £5bn. Apollo offered a surprise £5.7bn.

The £700m uplift is not mental, because EasyJet has things in its favour. The Telegraph notes that EasyJet owns all its planes and that these alone are worth £5bn. It also owns an undisclosed number of operating slots at Gatwick Airport, worth £9m a pair. And Apollo knows about airlines, having once owned US carrier Sun Country Airlines, an investment it successfully exited in May. 

In fact, the FT says Apollo has coveted EasyJet for a while and that when Castlelake put in a bid, Apollo activated its secret plan. Presumably Beidas, Tennent and Metzger were heavily involved in formulating this.

The EasyJet deal looks like a big win for Barclays, which has fallen down the UK M&A rankings in recent years, despite having M&A as a key area of strategic focus. 2026 was already looking up - in the first quarter, global M&A advisory revenues at the British bank rose by 78%, versus a fall of 13% at Deutsche Bank. Beidas joined from UBS to head UK advisory banking during a hiring spree in 2022. 

The Wall Street Journal notes that Apollo now has until August 7th to finalise its bid or to walk away. Castlelake has until August 3rd to put in another offer for EasyJet. If it does so, this would be Castlelake's sixth offer for the airline company. EasyJet's share price has risen 81% since Castlelake's bidding began in late May.

The real winners in the process are therefore EasyJet and its owner Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou. Sir Stelios is reportedly partial to Apollo, with whom he is friends. EasyJet's chairman is Sir Stephen Hester, who likes topiary and was once chair of Royal Bank of Scotland. EasyJet itself is being represented by Simon Robey and Simon Warsaw, who are the opposite of sweaty, irrespective of the temperature outside. 

Separately, you can make a lot of money as a trader but you can also lose money or join the sort of hedge fund that has no tolerance for poor performance and ejects you without opportunity for discussion or persuasion. 

A safer way of making money from trading is to persuade other people that you can teach them to trade and to become rich. Writing on his Substack, ex-hedge fund manager Marc Rubenstein notes that Avadhut Sathe, an Indian influencer, went down this route. Sathe made $63m over 10 years by persuading 400,000 people that trading equity derivatives would make their fortunes. 

This didn't happen. Rubenstein notes that the Indian Regulator scrutinised Sathe and found that 63% of his aspirational students actually lost money. Sathe himself also allegedly lost $450k in the 20 months to November 2025. Trading is a risky business. It's far easier to make money pretending it's not.

Meanwhile...

Citi's Vis Raghavan has been rattling bankers by holding meetings to berate them for failing to win key deals. (Financial Times) 

Goldman Sachs hired Drummond Rice from Blackstone to lead FIG ECM coverage. (Bloomberg) 

South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix is having a secondary listing on the Nasdaq that's expected to raise $28bn. Bankers from Goldman Sachs and Citi could make $140m in fees. (Financial Times) 

Only the big private equity firms raising $1bn or more appear able to raise money now. They've capture more than 80% of all money raised this year, their highest share in more than a decade. (Financial Times)

The Financial Conduct Authority used to take four hours to process supervisory cases. Now it takes six minutes using AI. (The Times) 

Graham Davidson, a managing director at Jefferies in London who focuses on specialty finance deals, will depart after nearly 10 years for boutique firm Continuum. (Financial News) 

Primary dealers have built a $4bn net short position in corporate debt. They carried a peak $16 billion of average inventory in 2017. Maybe this is because they think debt will fall in price, or because electronic markets have made trading more efficient, or because there's such demand for corporate bonds they can't keep up? (Bloomberg) 

Revolut poached Kuba Fast who set up ChaseUK. He will run the European business. (Finextra) 

Cantor is setting up a Milan office to expand across Southern Europe. (Bloomberg) 

Rachel Reeves wants to keep being chancellor. “After two years I’ve got a clear idea of how to get things done in government.” (Financial Times)  

A PWC employee who was supposed to be working in Dublin was actually working in India. He said he couldn't come back to Dublin because his landlord was selling his accommodation. (Irish Times) 

It's not great being a research in a hedge fund pod. The portfolio manager owns everything you build. (YoungandCalculated) 

Good luck applying for a job at Bending Spoons, the Italian technology conglomerate that's been buying up companies like AOL and Vimeo. It has 800,000 applications. 60,000 people make it through initial screening. 3,300 get interviews. 286 are hired. (WSJ) 

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