Something I've had a minor, but non-zero concern about for a while: to what extent are brokerage employees able to access client accounts and review a client's holdings or trading activity? (I'm an IB client but the Q goes for any brokerage.) Trading is a zero-sum game, and -- in addition to nosy employees -- most brokerage firms have internal prop trading desks who are essentially competitors of the brokerage clients. Information about what the bigger or more profitable clients are doing would seem to be critically sensitive information. Even if it doesn't take the most malicious form of, say, monitoring a client's open trades in real-time and exploiting that intel, employees could review successful clients' records to identify and replicate proprietary algos or strategies, etc. Employees obviously have full access to your accounts when you're in a secure / verified environment like a Support phone call or online chat, but can they pull up client records at will at other times? I'd like to think that reputable brokerage systems would keep electronic audit trails of who accesses an account and when, but I have no idea whether that happens in practice. Are there known instances of brokerages accessing client accounts to steal strategies or otherwise exploit them? Is this all too tinfoil-hatty?
This question has been asked thousands of times. brokerage employees are not interested in our trading strategies. because most traders are not earning money. There are other more important matters for us to focus on like our accounts going bust, brokerage firm closing down, internet disconnect ...
solution for long/short equity: Do all your long trades at one broker, all your shorts at another. Both your accounts PnL curves will look shitty so they will never identify you as a skilled trader
you say "us", are you a brokerage employee? not being interested in strategies does not follow at all from most traders not earning money. the top 1% or top 0.1% of accounts would be super interesting to look at
Can't tell how tongue-in-cheek this is meant to be...but presumably if you're a profitable trader at least one of your PnL's will be in the black. But regardless, this -- splitting long/short sides up b/t multiple brokers -- is something that's crossed my mind. Is is common practice among wary traders?