HELICOPTER TRADE FEAT HITS A HIGH
IT’S OFFICIAL: a new record has been set for the world’s highest currency trade, after Greg Secker took to the skies last Friday to make money out of thin air trading from a helicopter hovering 1,500 feet above the City.
The flying trader hopped between the Isle of Dogs radio masts – moved on from time to time by air traffic control – to spend the morning looking down on the HSBC tower as he traded on the Forex markets in the charity stunt.
Fifty traders back on the ground at Secker’s training firm Knowledge to Action and a further 250 of his clients around the country followed Secker’s trade calls through a live link-up to his Flying Trader website, raising a combined £35,000 for The Ubuntu Children’s Education Fund and Barnardo’s. “It was slightly surreal,” said Secker of the mission he hopes to get immortalised in next year’s Guinness Book of Records.
GONE FISHING
WHAT goes around comes around at financial PR firm Tulchan Communications.
Just weeks after Tulchan lost the prestigious brief to handle ITV’s financial PR, as revealed by The Capitalist on 26 May, the firm has started to redress the balance by poaching Ed Orlebar from M:Communications and James Macey White from Financial Dynamics.
“We like to grow our own talent but always have space for really good people from other firms,” said Tulchan’s founder Andrew Grant in an unambiguous statement no doubt designed to put the cat among his rivals’ HR pigeons.
CULTURE CHANGE
ON THE subject of staffing changes, Lord Triesman, the former FA chairman who resigned after a Mail on Sunday sting, believes there should be a complete clear-out of the old generation of Fifa officials in the wake of the bribery scandal rocking football’s governing body.
Speaking as part of a candid interview with Five News presenter Matt Barbel at the Norwood Property Lunch, he said of the body led by president Sepp Blatter: “If you have an organisation in which there are deep-seated problems, the most critical thing is that its culture changes.
“That generation [at Fifa], including some of the very good people, should stand aside and see a complete clean sweep, right through the organisation.”
QUAKE APPEAL
TONIGHT, bankers and lawyers will convene at the Gherkin for a fundraiser in aid of the Christchurch Earthquake Appeal UK organised by London 4 Christchurch, a group of City-connected New Zealanders.
Thanks to corporate sponsorship by Linklaters and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, all ticket proceeds will go direct to the charity. To book for this evening’s reception and auction, which will be held from 6.30pm to 9.30pm, see www.london4christchurch.com.