People should invest on their own through a discount broker. Why would anyone trust a broker, especially one from a boiler room. I guess the world needs stupid people so that someone else can get rich.
I was referring to the dwarfs vs. dwarves comment. TBH it doesn't come into casual usage very often, but they don't have spell check?
Discount brokers weren't really around back then or it wasnt the norm and you got your quotes from a quotron, no internet. This is how they did it.. it was a numbers game. You had a football field size boardroom with hundreds of cold callers calling 400 dials a day, hitting 40 people and getting 10 solid leads daily not just one guy but a hundred of them. They would turn it over to an army of account openers who would relentlessly call these leads and try to open up on 200 Kmart or 100 Georgia pacific...get it. Some of these clients had 2 or 4 mill in the mkt, so they'd open an account just to get you off the phone. Then once accounts were opened on blue chip stocks the brokers would flip them into house stocks for size, always getting around the No's while harping on the greed button. It wasn't like these guys had clients for years, they just had tons of them coming from the bottom up.
By and large quite a good description of the reality. A numbers game ... dialing for dollars. They like to bring some money -- even if it is small -- into the house with a stock that is a household name that way all the account opening BS is behind them when it is time to sell them a huge markup POS. It was essentially the same story in the 50's when Canadian boiler rooms sold mining companies into the US retail. The past 10 years has been dominated by six and eight page direct mail pieces to huge lists. The spend is about $700,000 to bring in about $3,500,000 if it's done right. People buy through their own brokers but it all originates in their box. The stock is boxed meaning virtually all the free trading shares are controlled by a single group. Get on the penny stock mailing lists or low priced minning shares list and you'll see the mailing pieces. Expensive four color printing with amazingly well targeted copy. I think the direct mail era has about had its run and is on the decline but hundreds of millions of dollars were made while it roared.
LOL...reminds me of a story a friend told me. He was trading and living in Australia, working for Merrill (I think) and the time and rang up the Goldman desk in New York to query a fill he was given on an ADR trade. Q: why was my fill 10c over the posted high of the day? A: I am looking at it it all looks good here. Nothing is the problem, thats where it traded, your prices must be incorrect. Our high shows the accurate price. Q...I am looking at my Bloomberg and I cannot fathom why my hedge trade price was done there? (Without holding down the mute button on his phone the guy in NY said to his colleague in a thick NY accent - "Hey this guys got a Bloomberg, do you think we should give him a proper price") My friend overheard all this and got the answer back..... A: "Hey sure buddy, sorry about that must have been a typo by some back office clerk we will fix that wont happen again"
just saw the movie. going in i had little expectations of anything good; boy was i surprised! thank God i did not bring my 13 yr old son though. found myself laughing out loud countless times; absolutely loved the movie. one point and its not a justification of what they did..but there was greed on both sides of the transactions..just sayin. looking forward to seeing it on the small screen again.