Written by a sales trader, for sales traders.
Reaction Desk is written by Christoph Kleinsasser, who spent twenty years in European equities, most of it in London.
Head of EMEA sales trading at ING Bank, with desks in London, Moscow, Istanbul, Warsaw, Prague and Budapest. Head of Emerging Europe sales trading at Kepler Cheuvreux. Head of equities at Erste Group, covering Vienna, London and the Central European desks. Head of Emerging Europe at Berenberg, built from launch. He started on the desk at UniCredit in London.
Across those roles he built desks and hired the people on them, which meant judging every day whether what a sales trader was about to tell a client was worth the call.
While at ING he was voted the number one individual in EMEA sales trading in the Thomson Extel survey, from a poll of more than sixteen thousand market participants across ninety-three countries.
None of those is a bulge-bracket name, and that is the part that matters here. At a house that is not the client's first call, flow does not arrive on its own. You earn the conversation by having something worth hearing at seven in the morning that the client cannot get from the four other brokers already on the line. Every rule on these sheets comes out of that.
Since 2018 he has run discretionary multi-asset strategies at 8M Partners. The questions on these sheets are the ones he now asks from the other side of the phone.
Every reporting season, the client's first question after a release is the same: which numbers mattered, did they come in, and how does a print like that trade on this name. The research note answers a different question, for a portfolio manager, with a target price attached.
Reaction Desk is the page a sales trader wants open at 07:02. It is not a second opinion on valuation.
Every call is locked and time-stamped before the company reports. On results morning, before the market opens, we name which scenario the release matched. No closing price exists at that point, so the scenario we are graded on cannot be the flattering one. The official close then settles it, and the grade is published whatever it says.
That last part is the only claim here worth making. Plenty of people have a view on how a print will trade. Almost nobody writes theirs down in advance, scores it afterwards against a rule they cannot bend, and publishes the ones that went wrong. The record is here, in full, including the calls that were mis-sized.
It is not investment research and it holds no view on what any security is worth. There are no price targets and no recommendations. Everything is built from public disclosures: company releases, regulatory filings, exchange data and published analyst counts. No broker research is used, no issuer pays for coverage, and we hold no position in any covered name.
Coverage is deliberately narrow and chosen for where the method works rather than for where the volume is. If you want a particular name looked at, ask.
info@reactiondesk.com