Maggie's Farm

It's only a six hour exam.

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Margin accounts
1 question on ethics

If she passes she will get lots of huzzahs and the telephone headset, unless she has many well heeled friends who can help he accumulate the 5 million in assets most houses see as minimum the first year.
My last year at Merrill I brought in and invested 18 million, but I'd been in the business for a time. I walked away.

It's the best $200,000 a year job you can have and the worst if you can't make that....

You have to "buy into" a heaping pile of WS bullshit and do alot of looking the other way. I saw people openly churning accounts and placing trades without the clients permission. They made $500,000 a year before a complaint forced the company to look at them, although they knew it was going on all the time.....it's a slimy world .... been there done that and I would never do it again.

There's a reason brokers score below used car salesmen in polling on trust.

Old wine, new bottle....there is no "clean end of the Wall Street turd" to grasp, sorry.

I suspect it will not chill her current exuberance but she might want to read "Blood on the Street" by Charles Gasparino....then go become a medical rep and marry a doctor.

Have you been there for 17 years? How long has the Pup been there? She doesn't even have a 7 yet and you have the audacity to call me a cynic.

Where have you been the past 10 years regarding WS? Enron mean anything? WorldCom? Martha Stewart, Dennis Koslowski?...lets go all the way back to Jay Gould?

Whatever you do you may do very well but unless you've walked the walk, the talk doesn't mean shit.

You sir are naive and do not even rise to the level of sciolism on the subject.

"Pup says all they talk about is integrity."

One of the great lines from the Magnificent Seven, "If God had not wanted them sheared he would not have made them sheep"

FROM BEHIND THE CORPORATE VEIL: THE OUTING OF WALL STREET'S INVESTMENT BANKING SCANDALS - WHY RECENT REGULATIONS MAY NOT MEAN THE DAWN OF A NEW DAY

It was the dawn of a new millennium, and the infamous Internet tech bubble was about to burst. For years on Wall Street you could practically recommend anything "beginning with 'e-' and see it trade at astronomical prices."2 However, behind the scenes, Wall Street was harboring a dirty little secret. Some of its highest paid investment bankers were handing out hot IPO3 shares in return for kickbacks Others were offering favorable stock recommendations from their research analysts in order to secure lucrative investment banking contracts In effect, Wall Street was catering to "two key constituencies: its institutional investors and its corporate clients. If the individual investor wanted to join the party, well, caveat emptor."4

Chew on this..it took about a millisecond to locate:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4048/is_200301/ai_n9213378

The difference between an optimists and a cynic is experience.

I wish her luck also.

There are scumbags in every business and every firm. Check

A good advisor knows who's who. Yep , that's why it took a grand jury years to develop cases against those in the securities industry who were violating laws right and left, becoming megamillionaires and superstars......they should have just asked their friendly broker who were the bad guys.
Sorry Tom but the broker/adviser/financial consultant usually doesn't know who the bad guys are, and if they know who the bad guys are and don't turn them into the SEC then they are violating their fiduciary responsibility to the client. If they did turn them in the "good guy" wouldn't last a year longer in the industry. Per capita the securities business probably has more bad guys than good guys and usually the good guys don't make it if they continue to be good guys......learn to fake it til you make it, cut a few corners, a little iffy here, a little iffy there and yeah, you can make it.

And if you're an investment banker making hundreds of millions of dollars and get caught, so what...do a year at Club Fed, pay a fine , and come out with what...what did Mike Milken come out with 800 million? So it's all good. You're buddies will understand, it's just part of the business.

A cynic, no. Just an observer of Wall Street and advisor for 17 years. But I had an advantage....I'd already done 10 years with the CIA so I'd kinda been around the block so to speak. Personally I'm glad as hell there are things called statutes of limitations.

Habu the cranky guy today.

There must be many honest ones. I should have used a much smaller brush to stick in the tar can.

It also was probably a situation where it was a business in which I should not have been involved. But darn the money aspect, the working hours when the market is open, the feeling of being on the edge of what's going on was alluring. I got in when the market was under 2000 and the "explosion" of Series 7 holders hadn't begun. Then when the nasty stuff started being revealed it was repugnant to me and I'm sure all those here. I would have loved to have had a shot at the IB and analysts who were colluding to provide me and thus my clients with bad data on issues. I guess the Lord was look'n out for me cause they don't send felony assault perps to Club Fed.

Anyway, I really do hope she hits a good spot, in a great house, and thrives. When you do that it's a sweet feeling cause you're gett'n some long green and you clients are sleep'n like babies.

Yes indeed, I remember like it was yesterday September 1920 when the Bolsheviks bombed the Exchange and sent via the US Mail 16 other bombs to such luminaries as J.P.Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and others including the US Attorney General. The chairman of the Senate Immigration Committee housekeeper had her hands blown off opening one of the packages. The House of Morgan to this day still has the pockmarks of the blast.

Yep WS can be dangerous. Bolesheviks here, a Jay Gould there. Now even the buttonwood tree traders are gone.

BD you slit my pinata wide open..I did get singed when both WorldCom and Enron went down.
Yeah I was hedging and attempting to pull all the right levers to remain insulated. Diversified ,absolutely, but when one ,especially in the business, has positions in equities that he has researched, watch diligently, made some profit on by taking a little off the table every now and then and still loses a hunk o'the green on it pisses you off.

Then you find out all the stuff Spitzer uncovered and it really, really toasts you. You've usually got your big clients in similar positions and they get raped as well.
And when the investment bankers got in bed with the analysts and started cooking the data, well lets's just say in my first job at CIA that type of crap could get you disappeared for good. Think that's a stretch .. do some due diligence on the death of William Colby who was the Director of CIA and a great guy, but was forced during the Church Committee hearings to give up the family jewels...do ahead take a look.

Please don't "do ahead"..you can do-do, do-rag, do run run run,a do run run...

GO ahead & look.

Actually I was surprised some irate investor didn't take a few of those guys out....sometimes it's just so hard to meet the right people.