Over the years, Wall Street has had its share of scandals, many of which left despair and loss in their wakes. These include everything from insider trading to fraud that cost investors millions of dollars. To fully understand the impact these crooked individuals had on financial history, we must examine the people themselves, what they did and the legacy their misdeeds left behind. While no two are alike, what these men share is the lasting effects of their crimes, which are still felt by Main Street many years later. Here we examine five of the most famous and unscrupulous Wall Streeters namely: Michael de Guzman, Richard Whitney, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, and Bernard Ebbers.
Canadian Miner - Michael de Guzman
He was the man many...
Articles
James Bond may have a license to kill, but regular folks need a license to do just about everything else from driving a car, flying a plane, managing money, and practicing law to doing someone's taxes. Is there something along those lines for trading?
When I first got interested in trading, I had no idea what training was required and figured the only way to learn was to enrol in the school of hard knocks. After I'd written a few articles, someone asked what trading credentials I possessed. At the time, I wasn't aware there were any internationally accepted trading certification programs. But after doing some homework, I discovered that there indeed was such a professional designation - the Chartered Market Technician (CMT) program...
Lucrative salaries, hefty bonuses and creativity on the job have resulted in quantitative trading becoming an attractive career option. Quantitative traders, or quants for short, use mathematical models to identify trading opportunities to buy and sell securities. The influx of candidates from academia, software development and engineering have made the field quite competitive. In this article, we’ll look at what quants do and the skills and education needed.
What Do Quantitative Traders Really Do?
The word "quant" is derived from quantitative, which essentially means working with numbers. The advancement of computer-aided algorithmic trading and high-frequency trading means there is a huge amount of data to be analyzed. Quants mine...
I’ve often been asked how I manage to work in this profession without losing my mind. The truth is, I think I have lost little bits of it over time. Just kidding! Seriously though, I don’t blame people for thinking that traders must be a bit crazy for doing what we do and, quite honestly, I think we must be able to handle the volatility from both the emotional/mental and financial perspectives.
I watched a very interesting video presented by a YouTube channel called “After Skool” that delved into emotion vs logic and how we live in a world that places far more emphasis and importance on the latter than the former. Among the many other insightful things that were stated by the narrator, probably the most important insight was that...
Much is made of the "Wall Street analyst" as though it were a uniform job description. In reality, there are significant differences between sell-side and buy-side analysts. True, both spend much of their day researching companies and industries in an effort to handicap the winners or losers. On many fundamental levels, however, the jobs are quite different.
The Sell-Side Job Description
Simply put, the job of a sell-side research analyst is to follow a list of companies, all typically in the same industry, and provide regular research reports to the firm's clients. As part of that process, the analyst will typically build models to project the firms' financial results, as well as speak with customers, suppliers, competitors, and other...