Institutional clients and arbitrage. Although I doubt they even do the second one anymore. Their international desks are always busy though.
Looking for jobs on Monster.com fearing that what happened to all the traders from SLK who got fired after Goldman took them over will happen to them. For what I hear the ones that are left are just filling orders when they come in instead of trading against them. I guess more like agency trading and just derive the fee for filling the order.
Is this the end for big firm trading or just part of the cycle. Will quants be the only traders left?
not like anyone ever REALLLY traded at the "brokerage houses". the closest they come to trading is bilking the order flow and program trading. when they have a chunk of money they designated as "risk capital", they give it to hedge funds to manage cause well, their own traders can't REALLY trade. Just look at their in-house mutual funds, what a joke. Yea, here's the big secret, the big Wall Street brokerage houses can't trade. Maybe the actual Merril Lynch and Salomon brothers (people, not firms) traded long time ago but their firms have since foregone trading for less-risky activities such as IPO fraud, and investment banking powered by fraudulent analyst research.