well said, we live in a land of opportunity, naturally there's more opportunity to those who have more and less, but still opportunity... cheers
I spoke with a trader with a phd in physics from princeton a couple weeks back. "Unimpressed" doesn't begin to explain.
Buying/selling securities of different nature from the same issuer, the most natural being straight bond vs. equity (a kind-of degenerate CB arbitrage). These kinds of arbitrage require good estimates of recovery rates and liquidity premia, both of which are notoriously difficult to model. Unfortunately, since these are usually distressed investment strategies, a private investor not backed up by a large team of lawyers (or mobsters) to enforce the recovery rates would not do too well. I was not trying to suggest that non-institutional trades are dumber then their institutional colleagues, I was just simply pointing out that the tools available to them are different.
Couldn't have said it better myself, Tea. Smoke and mirrors, most of the retail chop shop bolier rooms had offices that should have been in "Architectural Digest".