Grey is leaving us

[BSD]

Seems to me that all points of view seem to have been posted at one point or other here and now it really is getting pretty silly, and I don't actually think that this topic has any real relevance nor real points of interest that would even remotely justify turning this into such a widely read affair when it's really just lowly tabloid stuff I posted partly out of Friday afternoon boredom in the first place, I had no idea this was going to generate such interest.

But as it appears to be rapidly deteriorating beyond it's initial mundane levels if that's possible whatchoo all think, time to close it, what.

Nuff time wasted on such sordid but otherwise pretty completely irrelevant nonsense eh.

 

[MrGecko]

umm...

Finding a trade, taking it with proprietary capital, then advising your clients to do the same thing and charging a commission for the priveledge...

... isn't this the model for all IB dealing desks across the world? Infact some desks will find the trade, do it with there own capital, then sell this position to a 1st tier of clients (for comission), then at a later date sell it again to a 2nd tier / the public, again for comission.

Sure, there are some "snake oil" salesmen who take money and provide appauling services, but I don't think anyone who offers an advisory service should be painted with the same brush. Fact of the matter is that if you have good information, you can act upon it and sell it - the two need not be mutually exclusive. The general view of vendors as sleazy, immoral indviduals who must have failed at trading their own book I think is, on the whole, unfair. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule - but I would be suprised if a Sales Trader from HSBC's Equities desk was regarded with the same disdain as it seems some vendors are here - "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet".

Just a different perspective; never mind the romance of taking a pocket full of money and turning it into Billions - its capitalism, plain and simple.

 

[BSD]

Err, Front running ?!?



Banks don't actually do quite as much proprietary trading for their own books as many would assume.

And anyone who thinks banks have anything much of a real clue might want to

A: Revisit either the web bubble 1 and analysts recommendations back then, or the current mess caused by:

B: Banks and

C: Reread the excellent Liar’s Poker which is a superb, very insightful, and highly entertaining read about banks incompetence and general charlatanery in the field of investment advice to boot.

"PORTFOLIO.com

The End

by Michael Lewis Nov 11 2008

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989—Liar’s Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.

Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.

I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.

In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?"...

CONTINUED:
The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com

But I wasn't talking about employed bankers in the first place really, but rather the absolute top dogs that only traded for themselves, or started their own hedge funds, but a group of people who ended up making hundreds of millions or billions for their own private coffers, the people like Tudor Jones or Soros or Paul Rotter.

 

[zupcon]

I would be suprised if a Sales Trader from HSBC's Equities desk was regarded with the same disdain as it seems some vendors are here .

But surely there's some differences that need to be taken into account

the guy at HSBC sits in a big glass tower with HSBC in huge red letters plastered across it, he has a business card that quite openly declares his true adgenda to the world. He doesnt try to deny that he is, what he is

One would at least hope that HR within HSBC (for their many faults) would have recruited, trained or promoted the individual to that position on merit, and as such, the individual would be no better or worse than his peers.

What we have here is a clear case of a vendor, who screams and shouts that he's not a vendor. Its kind of like the guy in the HSBC building, who's paid a salary by HSBC, and turns up for work day in and day out flogging stuff for HSBC totally denying that he works for HSBC

In JayJay's case we have an individual who admitsto a 2 month track record, personally I hope his sucess is long lived and this is the first 2 months of a long and successful trading career. However, the sales pitch states that the trader has 15 years experience and this is misleading

Its kinda like paying HSBC for investment advice, and they in turn ask the office cleaner just cos he's admitted to having a couple of lucky punts. If it where discovered that the guy at HSBC was taking advice from the office cleaner (however good that advice might be), I suspect they would be treated with ridicule and scorn, and perhaps rightly so.

 

[BSD]

Lol just remembered this which is doubly funny now in this context...

Grey himself said he wanted to keep his chat small numbers wise because of S L I P P A G E ...

And whatever happened between then and now, but the fact of the matter currently is that his clown is going and mass marketing it on the web.

Unbelievable !

 

[MrGecko]

Err, Front running ?!?

Sure - Front Running, Chinese Walls, Insider Trading - there are Laws in place to try and prevent abuse of trust and conflicts of interest (did you know the FSA has never sucessfully made a criminal prosecution for an Insider Dealing case - charged / fined many with market abuse, but AFAIK no-one has actually been found guilty of it. Thats why they're having such a crack down). And I'm not sure my example counts as front running in the strictest sense anyway, but I digress.

What do you think broker upgrades / downgrades are about? You don't think they sell the info on to their premium custmers before making it generally available? You don't think clients can be charged for using their capital in a Black Box algo? If you want to drill down to the minutea of it, the banks / brokers might make their dough from the comissions in executing the deals, maybe from the price tag of "this might be a good trade" service, maybe because they have an inventory they want to move on - but that is neither here nor there IMO.

The crux of the matter is that selling information / distributing it with the intention of making a profit somehow, either good or bad, is part and parcel of the financial markets. I dont see what the big deal is about.

What we have here is a clear case of a vendor, who screams and shouts that he's not a vendor. Its kind of like the guy in the HSBC building, who's paid a salary by HSBC, and turns up for work day in and day out flogging stuff for HSBC totally denying that he works for HSBC

I'm not aware of the details of this particular case so I can't comment on it specifically, my comments were made "in general".

wrt the Guy in HSBC - he's a salesman. He spends pretty much all of his time finding the most attractive way to present the available information, or the way that most suits his agenda - exactly what any vendor is doing, presenting the service of making trading recommendations on a subscription basis. Of course, you can't lie and say you arent working for HSBC, or sell a donkey for a horse, but there are many shades of grey (no pun intended) within which salesmen (and/or vendors) can work.


On a different note - don't you need to be FSA registered to sell trading advice... ??

 

[ceydababy]

In the last few days I have seen at least 2 examples of moderators and advisors posting in threads where members where "enticing" others to sign up for calls, or training. If you really insist I can spend the afternoon trawling through the site.



Nothing wrong with my comprehension my friend. You obviously have too much time on your hands.

OK Linda Bradford Raschke is a distinclty average trader :whistling BSD, get real. 99.999% of this board would love to have a track record like her's. Let me guess you're probably better.

The fact remains that you made a sweeping generalisation without any backup regarding signal sellers and those that sign up to them.

Let's be honest, not many big hitters are going to sign up to a signal service, the majority of the time it's going to be small retail clients or spreadbetters trading with/against thousands of other market participants and I think the issue of slippage is a bit of a red herring.

The fact remains if I had 100 people signed up and was getting £100 a month from them that is £10k to me a month for nothing. Taking the same trades as I would be taking and getting another £10k on top of my trading profit for doing Sweet FA. Zupcon you're probably real big time hence you have all that time to "spend the afternoon trawling through the site" You're my hero Lunch is for wimps my friend.

 

[ceydababy]

Hell does that nonsense come from that trader dante OR any of his prop colleagues are flogging signals ?

What kind of complete, utter and total BS is that then ?

Those guys are traders and professionals at that, some of whom have made tens of millions from trading.

Why on earth would any of them feel the need to join the ranks of salesmen ?

Complete nonsense.

Re Linda Raschke, she is an OK trader, but nowhere even close to the top dogs that made hundreds of millions or even billions from trading.

Again, no top dog has ever nor would ever sell signals to complete losers who are actually deluded enough to believe that going down that route will ever offer them financial freedom.

Not complete nonsense. Check Dantes posts and you will see he mentions it. They may have made Tens of millions but not quite the Hundreds of Millions or even billions from trading that you seem to intimate puts you in the super trader category and thus not a signal vendor.

Your argument has more holes than a watering can my friend and you don't seem able to stay consistent. On one hand Dante is a superb trader who wouldn't stoop as low as to sell his signals (when he has stated himself that he does) and in the next sentence you infer that LBR is distinctly average and thats why she sells them.

I am sure even my Tom's own admission he would agree that LBR is probably more profitable than he.

You seem to move goalposts with alarming regularity to fit your ludicrous statements.

 

[zupcon]

In the last few days I have seen at least 2 examples of moderators and advisors posting in threads where members where "enticing" others to sign up for calls, or training. If you really insist I can spend the afternoon trawling through the site.

Nothing wrong with my comprehension my friend.

It looks as if you do have learning difficulties. Please point out why you think the above quote indicates that I'll spend time searching the site for posts to prove GREY1 is a vendor ?

The fact remains if I had 100 people signed up and was getting £100 a month from them that is £10k to me a month for nothing. Taking the same trades as I would be taking and getting another £10k on top of my trading profit for doing Sweet FA. Zupcon you're probably real big time hence you have all that time to "spend the afternoon trawling through the site" You're my hero Lunch is for wimps my friend.

Be honest, its not really "for nothing", sure 10K's 10K but its hasle you can really do without being asked dumb questions day in day out. I guess if you enjoy spending time with idiots in a chat toom, being paid 10K a month to do so is a decent proposition, personally I wouldnt do it for all the tea in china.

I'm certainly not a large trader by any means (although I suspect several thousand times larger than many around here), and yes, I have loads of free time thanks

 

[ceydababy]

It looks as if you do have learning difficulties. Please point out why you think the above quote indicates that I'll spend time searching the site for posts to prove GREY1 is a vendor ?



Be honest, its not really "for nothing", sure 10K's 10K but its hasle you can really do without being asked dumb questions day in day out. I guess if you enjoy spending time with idiots in a chat toom, being paid 10K a month to do so is a decent proposition, personally I wouldnt do it for all the tea in china.

I'm certainly not a large trader by any means (although I suspect several thousand times larger than many around here), and yes, I have loads of free time thanks

I'm not talking about a full on training program. That would be painful. However, just calls only no questions allowed. For £10k it wouldn't be worth the pain of all those stupid questions. But IMO £10k is money for old rope when it comes to just posting your calls as you take them. Now it's just a case of finding 100 people !

Anyways, some people would sell signals others wouldn't. However, for BSD to label all people who do sell them that as losers is a tad OTT.

The same way some people give advice on here for free and others don't. No rights or wrong's it's all about personal preference.

 

[zupcon]

I'm not talking about a full on training program. That would be painful. However, just calls only no questions allowed. For £10k it wouldn't be worth the pain of all those stupid questions. But IMO £10k is money for old rope when it comes to just posting your calls as you take them. Now it's just a case of finding 100 people !

Agreed, I know very few people who'd turn down 10K a month for doing practically nothing, and these days it's reasonably simple enough to incorporate technology to broadcast signals via IM or SMS etc. I guess there's still a bit of administration involved in collecting payments, and marketing the service to start with is probably quite time consuming, but in principle, if its no extra work, why not do it

Clearly there are genuine services, and I even acknowledge some do it just to fill in the time, or because they enjoy teaching.

 

[Trader333]

However this may all look, it was not the intention of Grey1 to charge for services and others also know this to be the case. I am sure people can throw up all sorts of circumstantial evidence to say he was but it is not correct. I could go into great detail as to why and nearly started doing so but then I know from having done this in the past that it is pointless once people have made up their minds.

That is it from me on this thread.


Paul

 

[BSD]

Not complete nonsense. Check Dantes posts and you will see he mentions it. They may have made Tens of millions but not quite the Hundreds of Millions or even billions from trading that you seem to intimate puts you in the super trader category and thus not a signal vendor.

Your argument

Jesus what do some of the people here smoke, really makes you feel like you're in a completely different movie...

WHERE EXACTLY DOES TRADER DANTE SAY HE IS SELLING SIGNALS ?!?

At least TRY and back up your BS.

This is so stupid it's brain dead.

NO prop firm would tolerate that for the reason mentioned MANY times:

SLIPPAGE.

What a joke.

Mr. Gecko, sure front running exists, but the point I am making is that first of all it is no big deal because banks do FAR less trading for their own books than is commonly assumed, and, second of all, the buy side like eg hedge funds who distribute business to the sell side will make VERY sure to monitor execution, ie if they consistently get worse prices than what the market is at they will soon make sure that that bank no longer gets their business.

They will expect the bank to work their order, getting them good prices, and then to all intents and purposes it doesn't matter if the bank make sthg for themselves.

But what we are talking about here is sthg COMPLETELY different...

We are talking about one clown selling signals, and then having potentially hundreds of baby clowns jumping on board at the exact same time.

COMPLETE difference to banks working orders for their eg hedge fund clients having hundreds of clowns jumping in one market at the exact same time.

Signal selling is a game by losers for losers, slippage guarantees that on top of all the other obvious idiocies about the whole charade.

 

[MrGecko]

I don't have an intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of an IBs dealing desk. And I am not making any assumptions about the size of their proprietary books, but in there lies my point - most of the revenues for these desks are from providing a service - be it excecution, research, sales, providing liquidity, whatever. A vendor who's business model is to sell trade ideas on to clients is assuming a business model similar to some of the "legacy" names that you might find in the City / Wall street.

Thats my point.

 

[ceydababy]

Jesus what do some of the people here smoke, really makes you feel like you're in a completely different movie...

WHERE EXACTLY DOES TRADER DANTE SAY HE IS SELLING SIGNALS ?!?

At least TRY and back up your BS.

This is so stupid it's brain dead.

NO prop firm would tolerate that for the reason mentioned MANY times:

SLIPPAGE.

What a joke.

Mr. Gecko, sure front running exists, but the point I am making is that first of all it is no big deal because banks do FAR less trading for their own books than is commonly assumed, and, second of all, the buy side like eg hedge funds who distribute business to the sell side will make VERY sure to monitor execution, ie if they consistently get worse prices than what the market is at they will soon make sure that that bank no longer gets their business.

They will expect the bank to work their order, getting them good prices, and then to all intents and purposes it doesn't matter if the bank make sthg for themselves.

But what we are talking about here is sthg COMPLETELY different...

We are talking about one clown selling signals, and then having potentially hundreds of baby clowns jumping on board at the exact same time.

COMPLETE difference to banks working orders for their eg hedge fund clients having hundreds of clowns jumping in one market at the exact same time.

Signal selling is a game by losers for losers, slippage guarantees that on top of all the other obvious idiocies about the whole charade.

You're wrong my friend. He does sell signals as do other traders at his prop firm. I could provide a link to the website where they are selling them but I don't want to be accused of promoting someone.

Want to move those goalposts again ??

I have better things to do than to trawl through thousands of posts that Dante has made but rest assured you are 100% wrong he does sell signals. If over the weekend I have time I will have a look for the relevant posts.

I'm sure Dante is loving the fact you're calling him a clown.

In terms of backup you're the man who spouts rubbish, makes sweeping grandiose statements that have no substance and then move goalposts to try and back up your weak ill thought out posts.

note to mod: Am I allowed to post the link to the website where Dante sells his signals ? I want to prove this CLOWN wrong once and for all

 

[BSD]

Mate the point is that a bank makes money through inter alia executing trades for say hedge funds...

Any self-respecting hedge fund will first of all not give a hoot about what advice the bank is trying to sell, thats for the Joes on the street to believe in and buy, and, second of all, go to ANY other bank if the bank does not properly work prices.

Which for the umpteenth time, lol, is COMPLETELY different than a signal selling clown AND all his paid up baby clowns flooding one market at one time with all their orders simultaneously....

thereby creating SLIPPAGE...

and guaranteeing that signal selling is a game of losers for losers.

Comparing the role of banks vs their buy side clients with signal sellers is totally comparing apples and oranges, it's like saying everybody who works in sales is doing the same thing.

 

[BSD]

He does sell signals as do other traders at his prop firm. I could provide a link to the website where they are selling them but I don't want to be accused of promoting someone.

Want to move those goalposts again ??

I have better things to do than to trawl through thousands of posts that Dante has made but rest assured you are 100% wrong he does sell signals. If over the weekend I have time I will have a look for the relevant posts.

Yeah lets see all that then.

But even if he does that changes ZILCH...

Because of...

You guessed it...

SLIPPAGE.

Signal selling is a game by losers for losers.

 

[MrGecko]

What's to say that someone selling signals isn't just talking up their own book? Say lag his calls until he's got his position on?

Whats to say he's got a position on at all? If he doesn't take the trades himself, and people are willing to pay for his calls, why not?

I agree with you that a buy side form should have its own view and trade accordingly - but that is not to say that the sell side cant make fortunes by selling Google stock to whoever will listen. Vendors are, IMO, firmly on the sell side, and I will certainly not go as far as to label them all as "losers" - prejudice aside, there are some very talented (and wedged) sell siders out there, you can't umbrella them all together.

Whatever happened w/ Grey1 I don't know.

 

[JTrader]

These threads about people leaving drive me insane!

If someones gonna leave, just make like a tree and do it. Quietly! no need to tell everyone else about it!

 

[BSD]

Haha lovely !

Hey J, you wanna buy soem signals ?

Special offer, 399,-.



You must really be brain dead to not get this whole thing lol, IF you can trade and compound, YOU'D BE NUTS TO divulge your strategy and waste time talking with losers the whole day on some chat having to answer the really EXTREMELY dumb questions from peole who don't even make an effort to learn the basics...

PARTICULARLY when you can't even trade properly that way any longer as slippage means it's all just one big small time joke anyway...

And worst of all, when INSTEAD you could be compounding your way to a real fortune.

Game BY losers FOR losers.