Prime Services and Securities Lending

Prime Services and Securities Lending Course Overview

The Prime Services and Securities Lending course aims to guide you to understand how the prime services team provides specialized services to help hedge funds make money and how securities lenders facilitate the shorting of stocks. Once you get started, you will comprehend how prime services (i.e., prime brokers) attracts investors, provides leverage, maintains margin requirements, performs clearing and settlement functions, offers custodial services, and produces real-time reporting for their hedge fund clients. Next, you will cover the securities lending function, where you will understand what securities lending is and identify key differences between short-sellers, stock lenders, and long-sellers. You will recognize how and why market participants may ‘short’ stocks. As short-selling is crucial to the stock market, we will analyze short-selling activity using multiple short equity metrics such as short interest and short interest ratio on Refinitiv Workspace screen.  

 

Finally, as mentioned earlier, securities lenders are essential to facilitate short selling. You will examine securities lending transactions using examples with a hedge fund manager who is bearish on a stock and wants to borrow a stock to short, a securities lender who will facilitate the borrow, and a long-only asset manager who will lend the stock. In this process, you will also see the distribution of borrow fees and various security lender models.

Prime Services and Securities Lending Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Understand what prime services is and how it fits within a bank
• Describe the range of prime services activities
• Recognize how and why market participants may ‘short’ stocks
• Comprehend how securities lending works and who are the market participants
• Calculate the cash flows involved in securities lending

   

 

Who Should Take This Course?

This Prime Services and Securities Lending course is perfect for anyone looking to build a complete understanding of capital markets. This course is designed to help those interested in careers in prime services, securities lending, hedge funds, portfolio management, and other sell-side trading careers. This course explores concepts useful for beginner and intermediate level capital markets professionals or business and finance students seeking to better understand securities lending transactions.