The potential sale of DundeeWealth is prompting brave talk of launching a breakaway independent investment dealer among professionals at Dundee Securities. Sales, trading, research and investment banking staff at Dundee Securities, a unit of DundeeWealth, have good reason to be concerned about their futures. The expected buyers of their money manager parent want the company for its mutual fund operations. CI Financial, Power Financial, Manulife Financial and Bank of Nova Scotia would each jettison just about everyone on the large team that CEO Kym Anthony has recruited to Dundee Securities the moment any of these suitors got their hands on DundeeWealth. So within the ranks, there is talk of creating the next GMP Securities, by forming a new investment dealer, based on a core group of Dundee Securities veterans. The problem with such a plan, which applies to any new dealer, is grabbing enough market share to turn a profit in an extremely competitive space. It's true that GMP Securities has come on strong since being founded in 1995 by a team of proven financiers and traders from Gordon Capital and First Marathon. But any number of other upstart independent houses failed to achieve this level of success. Statistics from this year show Dundee Securities hasn't been doing the volume of financing, or trading, that would indicate this team can sustain an independent platform. Dundee Securities ranks No. 35 among domestic investment banks in Bloomberg's league table of year-to-date equity underwritings, with lead positions on eight deals worth a total of $88-million. Rival independent Canaccord Capital ranked No. 6 on that list, GMP Securities was No. 7 and Genuity Capital Markets was 10th. On the debt side of the balance sheet, Dundee Securities is an also-ran, with just three corporate bond underwriting leads for $65-million, which was good for 26th spot. The firm also doesn't crack the top 10 list in TSX block trading, where GMP Securities consistently ranks No. 1 on the volume of its buying and selling. It's hard to imagine how Dundee Securities staff improve on recent results, without the support of DundeeeWealth.