The mods are probably running a boiler room somewhere lol! Seriously though, these are very interesting businesses. Im anxious to hear any other thoughts on the subject or if anybody knows of any other firms out there that resemble boiler rooms or are actually boiler rooms.
I personally met him at a titty bar when i worked for Biltmore Securities, which was a spinoff of Stratton, he was tossing 100's on to the stage at pure platinum in ft lauderdale. Google Biltmore Securities. I havent read the book, but can say i had never ever ever ever seen so much money in my life, until i stepped foot into that boardroom. It was the size of 1/2 a football field ( not as wide ) with 300 men ( 18-40) and a few woman ( aside from the sales assistants) banging away on the phone non stop. I have to admit it was the best shcooling i had ever received on how to close. It was the "box In" technique and you'd be not surprised but dumbfounded at how much money was being sent on 1 or 2 phone calls. These guys where doing one IPO a month netting about 25 million. It was absolutelyone of my crazier periods in life.
I worked at two of them back in the 90's. One was Stuart James, the other was Thomas James Associates. I worked at Stuart for a couple of months but I quit after a couple of months without opening any accounts. Sometime later I tried again at Thomas James, but same thing, no accounts and I quit. At Stuart James we had lists of names of people who had accounts at Blinder Robinson and we were cold calling them. They were too pissed off from being ripped off before to buy anything anymore. Some of the stocks that we brought public ended up doing pretty well. Stuart James brought out a company called Green Burrito foods that ended up being merged with another fast food restaraunt, Carl's Jr. Another one was Command Security. The ticker was CMMD back in 1990, I see now that it is on the Amex under MOC. Then there were some that flopped after Stuart James was closed down such as Kushner Locke, KLOC. It's on the pink sheets now, no real market for it at all without a boiler room full of brokers to rustle up buyers. The companies we took public were real companies, not just shells like you saw in the movie Boiler Room. The trouble boiler rooms run into are with the individual brokers churning and burning, or by skirting the 5% markup rule.
cold callers got info on the target, a week or so the target would then be called by an account opener with a blue chip stock reccomendation Kmart, Georgia Pacific for 100-200 shares, after about a week or so after the account opened it would go to the broker who would relentlessly pound the target into some shit stock with a bone in it. Then they would save the IPO units for the whales who would see their $7 a unit purchase of 1 warrant and one share balloon into $21 on the same day...the problem is they were given 2000 -3000 units which would entice them to buy big in the aftermarket where there was a bone for the broker and the rest to insiders selling....peace....now multiply this by one gazzillion and you can get an idea of how much money
Wow that sounds awesome! I bet it was probably as exciting as the pits of Chicago huh? To be honest it sounds like a fun job with lots of money but the whole illegal thing really turns me off Anybody know of a job that would be sort of like that but at the same time be legal? I was a tellemarketer during the summer of my junior year and absolutely loved jamming products down customers throats lol! I can only imagine how fun it would be if I was selling stock to people.
At the offices I worked at, there were no cold callers to get leads for the brokers, unless the broker hired one himself and paid him out of his own pocket. I only know of one broker who did that. The rip on warrants was a lot more that with stock, and one broker took full advantage of it, almost his entire book was warrants. I always wondered what would happen to him after the warrants expired, but I left before that happened. He drove a Porsche, BTW, not a cheap BMW or Corvette like all the other brokers.
As long as you stick to the rules, everything you do will be legal. All of the brokers in my office followed the rules, there were brokers back in New York that were doing the churing and burning and they were the ones who brought the whole firm down. You can hype them up and even strongarm them, but as long as you follow the "know your customer rule" you are in the clear. And don't churn and burn, and for god sake don't do trades without notifying the customer first.
That book was an entertaining read. I read it in disney world so it was sort of ironic reading a boiler room book in the magic kingdom ha. I found Jordan's myspace page: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=220064466 I'm guessing here but I suspect that mortgage brokering was somewhat similar to the boiler room scheme before it hit the fan recently. Another funny one to watch is Dennis Hof talk about how 'motivating' the girls on Cathouse on HBO to 'sell more' is similar when he ran a team of time share salespeople.