For super-competitive investment bankers, it is a virility symbol almost as potent as their ranking in the mergers and acquisitions league tables or their share of the bonus pool. The sheer acreage of the dealing floor speaks volumes about the amount of business being won, or at least aspired to, and the size of the bets being taken with the bank’s own capital.

Yesterday JPMorgan set down its credentials as alpha male in London by announcing plans for not one but four vast trading floors, each capable of accommodating 1,000 dealers.

Each will be the area of 25 tennis courts, enabling armies of dealers to trade equities, bonds, interest rates and commodities/currencies. The planned floors of 72,800 sq ft apiece will trump the existing record-holding trading floors of Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse, both at Canary Wharf. They will be at the base of a planned 20-storey building on London Wall in the City on the site of St Alphage House, which will be demolished.

JPMorgan said that it had entered exclusive talks with Hammerson, the property developer, to agree terms for building its new European headquarters. It plans to consolidate several London offices into the new HQ. Building work is scheduled to begin next year.

The choice of London Wall is a coup for the City, which has suffered a steady defection of investment banks to Canary Wharf over the past decade.

One reason for the shift east has been the shortage of buildings in the City with large enough floor footprints to accommodate hundreds of traders on a single floor.

Banks like to house traders together because it makes for more efficient use of hugely expensive IT databanks and electronic plumbing. Herding them together is also said to give them a trading edge, as market information, gossip and sentiment travels more quickly.

Trading has taken over from more traditional investment banking activities such as mergers and acquisition advice as the single most important source of profits for many investment banks.

Michael Snyder, chairman of the policy committee of the City of London Corporation, which is selling the site’s long leasehold to JPMorgan, said that he was delighted.

A spokesman for Canary Wharf said that JPMorgan could have achieved an even bigger trading floor if it had opted for Riverside Building in the Docklands. There the plan is for single trading floors of 80,000 sq ft.

JPMorgan’s investment in a new European headquarters is also a coup for London, suggesting the American bank’s centre of gravity is shifting eastwards.

Power bases

Size of biggest London trading floors:

JPMorgan (proposed new HQ) 72,800 sq ft
Lehman Bros 72,100
Credit Suisse 70,100
Citigroup 63,500
Barclays Capital 63,200
Merrill Lynch 61,100
UBS 54,500
Goldman Sachs 47,900
Deutsche Bank 46,100
Morgan Stanley 42,100
HSBC 40,800

Source: Times research

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