Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2012 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 26, 2012 Author:Various Post Date:2012-02-26 09:15:13 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:1370468 Comments:2390
The following piece is a co-exclusive with Wall Street on Parade.
If you want to trade securities at any brokerage firm in the U.S., you’ll need to study intensively for about three months, memorize dizzying rules and regulations, then take a six hour licensing exam. (The exam is so rigorous that it’s compared to the CPA exam. I don’t know if it’s fact or lore, but I was told exam rooms in past decades had puke buckets in the corners. My room didn’t in 1986.) Then, you’ll need to get fingerprinted, pass a background check, register with a host of stock exchanges, make sure you have a supervisor who holds a principal’s license, get approved in each state in which you plan to conduct business, and take ongoing continuing education classes to keep your licenses.
Or, you could skip all of that and earn $14 million a year trading – without a license – stocks, bonds, swaps, options, futures with $374 billion of bank depositors’ money at JP Morgan Chase’s Chief Investment Office – a unit few on Wall Street had ever heard of until it reported losing billions of dollars in May in the same derivative transaction that made AIG a ward of the taxpayer in 2008.
