"Traders are replaceable."

By JENNY ANDERSON
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Investment banks, which rushed into the new territory of physical commodities starting at the turn of the century, are now beating a retreat.

Banks are leaving the business in the face of increasing regulatory scrutiny and falling profits. Competition and a relative calm in commodities prices have also pinched profits.

Wall Street firms often race into and out of businesses like commodities based on the profit they can make. While Goldman Sachs got into commodities in 1981, with the acquisition of the commodities trading firm J. Aron & Company, many banks, including Barclays, invested aggressively to build their commodities business only to dismantle it a few years later and start again.

Jeffrey M. Christian, managing partner at the CPM Group, a commodities research consulting firm, said that he left banking because of the yo-yo nature of the business: Build in good times, destroy in bad times, start again.

“You ask bank management, ‘Will you regret this decision to exit the business?’ And the answer is ‘No, we won’t, because we will throw it away now and we will save quite a bit of money and we can always rebuild it because traders are replaceable.’ ”

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/barclays-poised-to-announce-exit-from-commodities/

 

Losing traders (the sort they had, or they wouldn't be killing the business) are obviously replaceable. Just think how many you could recruit from the system chasers and system sellers on here.

 

Even banks admit trading is not a career. Once gambling goes south, it's time to shut the casino.

 

This is related to regulatory changes, not the nature of trading itself.

 

This just reinforces my opinion that a good and consistently profitable trader ( not something easy) , is a highly valuable thing and even banks can't "create" these type of talent - inspite of all the money they can throw at training , courses and al.
So retail traders who are doing well : Keep your head up, and very high.

 

Big banks (and the banksters behind them) do not even need to trade or form traders, they make an insane amount of money just by existing, using the biggest legal Ponzi scheme on earth : the fractional reserve system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWl7Mb49vSk

 

When a scammer, be a very good one.

I wonder how much of a threat are locally created currencies?