How do you spell MiFID?

I should possibly start off by explaining that I work for a German consulting company. Over the past two years I have been tracking the (lack of) progress towards the implementation of MiFID here in Germany.
The German financial markets are exceptionally conservative, it takes them a few years of sitting back and looking at what the rest of the world does before they even think about adopting new business practices here in Germany. In the specific instance of MiFID, I think that this aversion to change is going to hurt. Let me explain...

During this year I have been to visit a number (most) of the financial institutions who are based in Germany and do not conduct their investment banking activities from somewhere outside of Germany. The approach to MiFID is common to all of them and goes a bit like this.

We are a German Bank, with German customers, who are interested in German financial products. Our experience here in Germany over the past xxx years is that the (pick a regional exchange) has provided the "Best-Execution" for our customers we will therefore continue to send all of our orders to that exchange. It will clearly take some time to establish if any other possible venue is able to offer "Better-Execution" on a regular basis. We will be conducting a review of our Execution Policy in Late 2008 but do not expect that things will change.

Oh, OK so Best-Execution seems not to be an issue then. The various German Exchanges not only offer the best result today but are expected to do so for the foreseeable future.

The way that they plan to address Client Classification is even more interesting. There seems to be two possible approaches to this.

Plan-A: Everyone is a private client. We are a private client institution and see the value that we add is the manner in which we advise and manage our relationships with our customers. We have adopted the global German response to Best-Execution (see above) and do not see that we need to do anything other than the most minimal of changes to the manner in which we deal with our customers.

Plan-B: Everyone is a Qualified Counterparty. We are a huge big investment bank that deals exclusively with professional management and finance executives within or base of corporate customers. Our clients fully understand the implications of their trading decisions. We did read somewhere that the client has the right to opt out of this classification for certain classes of instrument. Quite frankly, if they do not feel sufficiently confident in understanding the structure of Synthetic Collateralised Debt Obligations, and really wanted us to change their classification to Professional or Private Client, then we think it would be best to do this for all instrument classes. Clearly this is not a trivial change and it would take a few months to process all of the paperwork, conduct all of the tests and downgrade their status. We think that when we advise them of the complications that this would cause them, they would see reason and continue to be classified as Qualified Counterparties.

The trick seems to be that MiFID is just another reporting obligation and we need to make certain that we do the absolute minimum to ensure that we comply.

Even more entertaining is a brief look at the Landesbanken and Sparkassen who will be building their own Germanic version of what sounds like project boat in order to meet their Pre and Post trade reporting requirements. Expect this to be built in the throbbing financial metropolis of Köln, using the skills and experience of those nice people from IBM. Big-Blue-M-Q.

I don't normally do financial advice or stock picking but in this instance might I be so bold as to suggest any of the more obvious short strategies?