Connect with us

Technology

Taiwan’s Stock Pickers Are Walking Out to Bet Their Own Money

Published

on

NEW YORK, Oct. 19, 2026 /CNW/ — Fly On Wall Street News Commentary – Taiwan’s benchmark stock index was up 62% this year, the best showing of any major equity gauge in the world, when Bloomberg reported on Oct. 16 that some of the island’s professional fund managers and analysts are quitting their jobs to invest their own money. Strict rules keep them from trading the very stocks they pick for clients, and in a year when about one in ten stocks in the index has more than doubled, some have decided the trade-off is no longer worth it. Companies and funds mentioned in this article include: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited [TSMC] (NYSE: TSM), ASE Technology Holding Co., Ltd. [ASE] (NYSE: ASX), United Microelectronics Corporation [UMC] (NYSE: UMC), iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF (NYSE Arca: EWT), The Taiwan Fund, Inc. (NYSE: TWN).

Watching From Behind the Locker

Taiwan does not ban personal investing outright, but its asset-management code of conduct bars staff from trading a locally listed stock or a linked derivative within seven business days before or after their firm’s funds trade it, which in practice rules out personal stock-picking. Fund managers must also lock away their phones, laptops and smartwatches each morning until the market closes at 1:30 p.m. The phone rule was formalized in 2024 to deter insider trading, the Taipei Times reported in July, after six former fund managers from four firms were indicted for front-running trades through the accounts of relatives and friends.

Ken Tsai, 40, a fund manager who until July worked at a large Taiwanese asset manager that Bloomberg did not name, told Bloomberg he made a Taiwanese maker of AI-server data-transfer components his fund’s largest holding in 2024. The stock rose more than fivefold in 2025 and about sixfold again this year, but he owned none of it personally. “It left me with a strong sense of relative deprivation,” he said. He now works at a private investment firm in Taipei, which was also not named. Pay adds to the pull: Taiwan portfolio managers earn roughly US$124,000 to US$311,000 a year, well below Hong Kong base salaries, according to Bloomberg, citing headhunters and recruitment-firm data.

The private shops they are joining sit outside those rules. They register as private companies with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and do not need asset-management licenses from the Financial Supervisory Commission because they do not raise public money. Brokers told Bloomberg some of them now generate more than NT$10 billion in monthly trading volume, rivaling mid-sized asset managers.

The Rally Behind the Exits

Much of the rally traces back to the AI hardware supply chain. TSMC reported third-quarter revenue of NT$1.49 trillion (US$46.7 billion) on Oct. 15, up 50.9% from a year earlier, while net income jumped 68.7% and gross margin reached 66.4%. It guided fourth-quarter revenue from US$52.3 billion to US$54.3 billion.

Chip packaging and testing has ridden the same wave. ASE Technology reported September net revenue of NT$88.1 billion, up 45.5% from a year earlier, and third-quarter revenue of NT$244.2 billion, up 44.8%.

Mature-node foundry UMC reported August sales up 30.71% from a year earlier, lifting year-to-date sales 14.66%. In its second-quarter report, the company guided for capacity utilization above 90% in the third quarter and said revenue from its 22/28nm business continues to set record highs.

CONTINUED… Read more market coverage at: flyonwallstreet.com

A Talent Squeeze, Not a Stampede

The numbers point to churn more than an exodus. Fewer than half of Taiwan’s 20 largest local equity mutual funds have kept the same portfolio manager for more than three years, according to fund-data site MoneyDJ, and Bloomberg reported that applications for junior roles at some international firms have roughly halved this year. Yet the FSC said the industry’s registered headcount actually rose to 4,729 in September from 4,581 at the end of 2025. Firms are responding: the largest foreign asset manager in Taiwan is offering cross-market analyst roles and office rotations to keep staff.

Regulators are paying attention. The FSC said on Oct. 15 it is gathering information and plans to review the rules, balancing market development against conflicts of interest and investor protection. One asset-management executive told Bloomberg there is no easy solution for now.

The Case for the Pros

At least one professionally managed fund has kept pace. The Taiwan Fund, a closed-end fund listed in New York, reported a 47.36% total return for its fiscal quarter ended May 31, against 26.12% for the TAIEX Total Return Index over the same period, with net asset value of US$116.90 a share at the end of that quarter.

Investors who prefer to own the whole market can use the iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF, which holds about US$11.9 billion in assets.

Last week was a reminder of how quickly the math can change. The TAIEX fell 4.6%, its first weekly decline in five weeks, as a technology selloff spread and TSMC CEO C.C. Wei warned of macroeconomic uncertainty and weak consumer demand, according to Trading Economics. In New York, TSMC’s shares fell 8.98% from the Oct. 9 close to $412.61 on Oct. 16, ASE dropped 14.86% to $39.53, UMC slid 13.68% to $19.82, the iShares fund lost 7.04% to $106.26 and The Taiwan Fund declined 8.78% to $94.18, according to Stock Analysis data. For the managers who just traded a salary for their own account, those swings now land on them.

Taiwan’s index fell 4.6% in a single week. Learn to read the charts behind moves like these with the free Stock Preachers guide, plus The Roadmap market reports, at stockpreachers.com.

Contact Information:

flyonwallstreet.com

Media Contact: info@flyonwallstreet.com 

DISCLAIMER: Nothing in this publication should be considered as personalized financial advice. We are not licensed under securities laws to address your particular financial situation. No communication by our employees to you should be deemed as personalized financial advice. Please consult a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decision. This is not a paid advertisement and is neither an offer nor recommendation to buy or sell any security. We hold no investment licenses and are thus neither licensed nor qualified to provide investment advice. The content in this report or email is not provided to any individual with a view toward their individual circumstances.

This article is independent news commentary. Fly On Wall Street is wholly owned and operated by Market Equities Limited (“MEL”), a company incorporated under the laws of Ireland. MEL has not been paid by any fund sponsor or company mentioned in this article. MEL and its owners, operators, directors, and affiliates do not currently own any shares of the funds or companies mentioned in this article, but reserve the right to, and will, buy and sell shares of those funds and companies at any time without further notice. Weekly price changes for U.S.-listed shares are from the October 9, 2026 close to the October 16, 2026 close based on Stock Analysis data and do not include distributions. Information is drawn from company and fund releases and filings, published reporting and third-party data believed to be reliable, but its accuracy is not guaranteed. Investing in securities carries risk, including the loss of some or all of your investment. This document is governed by the laws of Ireland.

 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/taiwans-stock-pickers-are-walking-out-to-bet-their-own-money-302912898.html

SOURCE Fly On Wall Street

Continue Reading

Technology

Cboe Clear U.S. Receives SEC Approval to Expand Clearing Capabilities

Published

on

By

SEC registration enables Cboe Clear U.S. to clear binary securities options alongside futures, positioning it to support innovation across the market

CHICAGO, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Cboe Global Markets, Inc. (Cboe: CBOE), a leading global markets operator and pioneer in equity and index derivatives, today announced that Cboe Clear U.S., LLC (CCUS) has received temporary registration from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to operate as a Covered Clearing Agency.

The registration expands CCUS’s clearing capabilities beyond its existing authorities as a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)-registered Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) to clear securities products in addition to futures and swaps products. Together with recent enhancements to its regulatory framework and product scope, the milestone positions CCUS to support innovation and emerging opportunities across a broad range of assets and markets.

CCUS will initially use its SEC registration to clear Cboe’s binary securities options tied to specified corporate key performance indicators (KPIs), which are planned to list on Cboe Options Exchange and be available on Robinhood in the fourth-quarter 2026. CCUS also recently received CFTC approval to clear margined futures broadly and continues to clear digital asset derivatives under its DCO designation.

“Clearing plays a critical role in bringing innovation to market,” said Dale Michaels, Head of Cboe Clear U.S. “These expanded capabilities position Cboe Clear U.S. to become an innovation lane to support new products and meet evolving customer needs, while maintaining the rigorous risk management standards that are fundamental to our business.”

These efforts complement Cboe’s longstanding partnership with The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC)® and Cboe’s continued commitment to supporting the established clearing infrastructure for traditional equity options.

The development builds on the growth of Cboe’s established European clearing business, where Cboe Clear Europe has become the leading pan-European equities central counterparty, while expanding into new services such as securities financing transaction clearing. Together, these advances demonstrate Cboe’s ability to extend its clearing capabilities across markets and asset classes.

To support its own future growth, CCUS has strengthened its infrastructure over the past year, including electing in June to become a Subpart C DCO. In doing so, CCUS is voluntarily adopting the enhanced standards the CFTC applies to systemically important DCOs for financial resources, risk management and operational resilience, aligning with those applied to leading global clearing organizations.

About Cboe Global Markets

Cboe Global Markets (Cboe: CBOE) is a leading global markets operator with a long history of innovation in equity and index derivatives. Since launching the world’s first listed options exchange in 1973, Cboe has pioneered landmark products, including the introduction of S&P 500® index options and the creation of the VIX® Index, the world’s leading gauge of market volatility, reshaping how investors manage risk and access opportunity. Today, Cboe operates derivatives, equities, and FX markets, providing trading, clearing, and investment solutions for customers worldwide. To learn more, visit www.cboe.com.

Cboe Media Contacts

 

Cboe Analyst Contact

 

Angela Tu

+1-646-856-8734

atu@cboe.com

Tim Cave

+44 (0) 7593-506-719

tcave@cboe.com

Kenneth Hill, CFA

+1-312-786-7559

khill@cboe.com

CBOE-C
CBOE-OE

Cboe®, Cboe Global Markets®, and VIX ® are registered trademarks or service marks of Cboe Exchange, Inc and S&P 500® is a registered trademark of Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners. 

Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. You can identify these statements by forward-looking words such as “may,” “might,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential” or “continue,” and the negative of these terms and other comparable terminology. All statements that reflect our expectations, assumptions or projections about the future other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions about us, may include projections of our future financial performance based on our growth strategies and anticipated trends in our business. These statements are only predictions based on our current expectations and projections about future events. There are important factors that could cause our actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

We operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible to predict all risks and uncertainties, nor can we assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements.

Some factors that could cause actual results to differ include: the loss of our right to exclusively list and trade certain index options and futures products; economic, political and market conditions; compliance with legal and regulatory obligations; price and new products and services competition and consolidation in our industry; decreases in trading or clearing volumes, market data fees or a shift in the mix of products traded on our exchanges; legislative or regulatory changes or changes in tax regimes; our ability to protect our systems and communication networks from security vulnerabilities and breaches; our ability to attract and retain skilled management and other personnel; increasing competition by foreign and domestic entities; our business and operational dependence on and exposure to risk from third parties; factors that impact the quality and integrity of our and other applicable indices; our ability to manage our global operations, growth, and strategic acquisitions, wind downs, divestitures, or alliances effectively; increases in the cost of the products and services we use; our ability to operate our business without violating the intellectual property rights of others and the costs associated with protecting our intellectual property rights; our ability to minimize the risks, including our credit, liquidity, market, investment, counterparty, and default risks, associated with operating our  clearinghouses; our ability to accommodate trading and clearing volume and transaction traffic, including significant increases, without failure or degradation of performance of our systems; misconduct by those who use our markets or our products or for whom we clear transactions; challenges to our use of open source software code; our ability to meet our compliance obligations, including managing our business interests and our regulatory responsibilities; the loss of key customers or a significant reduction in trading or clearing volumes by key customers; damage to our reputation; the ability of our compliance and risk management methods to effectively monitor and manage our risks; restrictions imposed by our debt obligations and our ability to make payments on or refinance our debt obligations; our ability to maintain an investment grade credit rating; impairment of our goodwill, long-lived assets, investments or intangible assets; the accuracy of our estimates and expectations; and litigation risks and other liabilities. More detailed information about factors that may affect our actual results to differ may be found in our filings with the SEC, including in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025 and other filings made from time to time with the SEC.

We do not undertake, and we expressly disclaim, any duty to update any forward-looking statement whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cboe-clear-us-receives-sec-approval-to-expand-clearing-capabilities-302918297.html

SOURCE Cboe Global Markets, Inc.

Continue Reading

Technology

Hears Everything, Uploads Nothing: VoxNexus Launches Android’s First Low-Power On-Device Always-On Voice Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Published

on

By

VoxNexus’ new on-device ambient listening solution runs for 12 hours on 2.49% of a phone’s battery and never sends audio to the cloud

MADRID, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — VoxNexus (www.VoxNexus.ai) released VoxEdge, an on-device voice stack that brings speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis to affordable Android devices, entirely offline. VoxEdge supports speech recognition in 36 languages, translation in 103 languages, and speech synthesis in 45 languages—all running with no connection, no data bundle, and no cloud token bills.

AI should work for everyone, not just for speakers of a handful of mainstream languages. Yet across much of Africa, voice AI has been held back by scarce training data and the lack of targeted fine-tuning. Everyday speech also includes code-switching and dialect variation, while cloud-based inference costs can make deployment at scale expensive. 

VoxNexus’s solutions run entirely on device, and every query is free once the model is installed on the device. Its speech recognition model has as few as 65 million parameters and achieves a lower word error rate than open-source models nearly ten times its size.

“Under-resource languages aren’t small languages. Hundreds of millions of people speak them. Until now, AI models just haven’t learned them yet,” said Charles Shi, CEO of VoxNexus.

VoxNexus also launched VoxSense, an on-device ambient listening solution that uses only 162 mAh for 12 hours of continuous listening, around 2.5% of a 6,500 mAh phone battery. By keeping all processing on device, VoxSense makes always-on listening practical without draining the battery and without sending any audio to the cloud. Developers and device makers can easily integrate it through a license and a simple SDK. Developers can request a free trial here: www.VoxNexus.ai.

VoxSense and VoxEdge were unveiled at the MediaTek Dimensity 9600 launch in Madrid on October 19.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of VoxNexus AI. 

About VoxNexus:
VoxNexus builds AI that hears and speaks — for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Its audio intelligence runs entirely on-device, delivering low latency, built-in privacy, and zero token cost across any device with a chip. VoxNexus is headquartered in Singapore. Website: www.VoxNexus.ai. Contact: public@voxnexus.ai  

VoxNexus demonstrates live on-device speech recognition at the MediaTek Dimensity 9600 launch in Madrid on Oct. 19, 2026. Spanish and English conversations were transcribed in real time on the phone, with no cloud connection. (Photo: VoxNexus) 

Speaks Your Language, No Internet Needed: VoxNexus Brings On-Device Voice Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 100+ Languages to Affordable Android Devices

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hears-everything-uploads-nothing-voxnexus-launches-androids-first-low-power-on-device-always-on-voice-artificial-intelligence-ai-302918304.html

SOURCE VoxNexus AI

Continue Reading

Technology

team.blue extends €1.1 billion of its Term Loan B to 2032 in the largest software Euro term loan issuance in the last 12 months

Published

on

By

GHENT, Belgium, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — team.blue, a leading pan-European provider of digital solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) backed by Hg, CPP Investments and Sofina, today announces the successful pricing of an amendment and maturity extension for €1.1 billion of its existing €1.35 billion Term Loan B. The transaction priced on 22 October 2026, with the refinanced tranche extended from September 2029 to July 2032, reinforcing the Company’s prudent capital structure approach.

Strong demand from a broad group of institutional investors enabled team.blue to upsize the transaction twice in-market, taking the final deal size to €1.1 billion from a minimum initial launch size of €500 million, despite recent credit market volatility. Pro forma for the transaction, c.90% of team.blue’s term debt now matures in 2032.

The transaction comes at a time of significant momentum for team.blue, with continued double-digit revenue growth and strong cash generation supporting its deleveraging trajectory. Its products help Europe’s SMBs get online, get customers, get paid and stay compliant, and AI-enabled products are increasingly driving new customer growth. team.blue continues to innovate across its portfolio, from smarter tools within its brands to secure European cloud hosting built for customers’ growing AI workloads. Its category-leading SaaS brands are also integrating with leading AI assistants, bringing team.blue’s products to customers wherever they work.

Transaction highlights

The largest software Euro term loan issuance in the last 12 months€1.1 billion Term Loan B, borrowed by team.blue Finco S.à r.l., maturing July 2032Priced at E + 425bps with a 0% floor and an OID of 98.5Upsized twice from an initial €500 million, reflecting a heavily oversubscribed order bookCorporate and facility ratings of B3 (Moody’s) and B (S&P), both with stable outlooksBofA acted as Global Coordinator and Left Lead Physical Bookrunner, alongside Barclays. ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Citi, ING and J.P. Morgan acted as Bookrunners

Jonathan Thackray, Chief Financial Officer of team.blue, said:
“We set out to extend €500 million of our Term Loan B, and the depth of support from our institutional investor base allowed us to go much further. This reflects confidence in team.blue’s highly recurring, cash-generative model and our position as a leading digital partner for Europe’s SMBs. It gives us the flexibility to keep innovating and investing in the digital and AI-enabled tools our customers rely on.”

About team.blue
team.blue is the pan-European digital partner for small and medium businesses, serving more than 3.5 million customers in 24 countries. From web hosting, domains, email and cloud and AI infrastructure to e-commerce, engagement, payments and compliance tools, team.blue helps SMBs get online, get customers, get paid and stay compliant. Supported by more than 4,000 employees, team.blue’s vision is to make online business success simpler, with artificial intelligence at every step. 

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/teamblue-extends-1-1-billion-of-its-term-loan-b-to-2032-in-the-largest-software-euro-term-loan-issuance-in-the-last-12-months-302918306.html

Continue Reading

Trending