http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/21/goldman-sachs-bonus-payments As you can see, they always make money and it a lot of it comes from their trading desk. My question is, how can we follow their trading methods? Please refrain from conspiracy theories or anti-semitism. If you think they actually benefit from an unfair advantage due to insider information, that's a fair answer. So is market manipulation. For anyone who follows the GS trading desk closely, it's clear that they are on the right side of the trade many more times than anyone. If it's superior trading, what do you think they're doing?
"a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm." Some trading at Goldman Sachs might be the retail distribution of corporate and government bonds. In other words, XYZ Corp. needs to borrow USA $ 10 billion, XYZ company issues bonds worth $ 11 billion and Goldman Sachs sells the bonds. The extra $ 1 billion worth of bonds is Goldman Sachs' profit. Trading at Goldman Sachs might not be the kind of buying and selling that a retail trader performs.
Goldman Sachs is at the TOP of their game. Information flow comes from the TOP on down. Guess who gets the info first? The info flow GS gets from the other side of their business flows to the trading dept, There is "ZERO" Chinese wall between the flow of info as they naturally say. Consider Cargill in the commodities business, they might very well have a whizbang year if they speculated with the info flow their business generates and allows them to collect in order to run their BUSINESS. Goldman Sachs looks at it in a different light. GS treats info gained from the other side of the Chinese wall as "OURS". PS: Have you figured out who gets the info flow last?