Investment banks are businesses...Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs are not making their fortunes by trading, it is from commissions, transaction fees, market making, IPOs, financing, etc.. Warren Buffet is rich from owning businesses not trading stocks like a piker. Real estate and owning a business is the true path to riches, especially if you are already rolling in millions. You to understand where real wealth is derived from. No day trader is making millions of dollars on the reg. A billionaire is putting money in bonds and stocks as a means of investing or securing money already eared from daddy, real estate or business.
True words for sure. I'd say the only exceptions are if you can pull a Soros and force a currency to revalue or corner a market. Same thing with activist investing, i.e. buying up a company with a bunch of value locked up and forcing them to unlock it or buying enough junior distressed debt in a failing company to force the senior debt holders to pay you off to avoid a protracted chapter 11. None of those is trading like a piker though, in fact just the opposite they're taking advantage of the ability to move markets through size instead of trying to avoid it.
you're mostly wrong there. the commission business barely breaks even. research is a loser. IPOs yes. but the biggest single delta to the overall p/l is the trading books.
That's an interesting comment to make given that Merrill and GS shut down their prop trading groups in 2012, as did all the U.S. bulge bracket banks, and are not longer legally allowed to prop trade. Yet somehow they are still doing pretty well. Sure there is a little prop trading going on in the guise of risk management, but it's not nearly to the level to be providing "the biggest single delta to the overall p/l", and if you look at their financial statements that certainly isn't the case.
"client facilitation" = prop trading you're running a prop book off the back of client trades or managing a hedge book vs your warrants / other exotics you've dealt any way you present it, you're trading prop with compliance ticking it off as "client facilitation"
Like I said, while that certainly goes on there's absolutely no evidence that the prop trading portion of it provides the "single biggest delta to p/l". In fact the breakdown of profits on financial statements would indicate otherwise, as well as the size of the desks vs the size of the former prop desks, the star traders who all left in 2012 without being replaced by anyone known as a trader at all, as well as the fact that the people in what you maintain to be thinly disguised prop trading desks aren't compensated based on the performance of their books and hence have less than zero incentive to break federal law to enrich the bank..... If you're into a whole grand conspiracy theory then no point in continued discussion, but all evidence points to prop trading making up a tiny part of the revenue, let alone p/l for any of the major i-banks. --Edited to say prop trading--
nothing to do with betting meh. let's assume you know what you're talking about the floor's yours - tell us how it is champ
Real estate even at the lowest level, an individual borrowing to purchase a home, is a levered investment with low liquidity and expensive commissions. Returns on initial margin or equity ar nothing to sneeze at.
I just did, if you disagree then feel free to articulate why. Otherwise not sure what your point with the "mehs" and "champs" are, just an inability to admit you're wrong?