Quote

We don't have sales trading, brokerage, capital lending - any of those kinds of things that got some of the Wall Street firms a little bit in trouble.

Over the years, the technology of trade has changed in response to advances in the ability to communicate. From its origins on the streets of Chicago, the Board of Trade moved to a building housing 'trading pits' for the open-outcry exchange by brokers representing buyers and sellers.

To me 'The Big Easy' is shorthand for owning big stocks that are easy for wary investors to buy into. These stocks tend to outperform during the back half of bull markets.

Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.

It's no secret that big institutional investors have a lot of advantages on Wall Street. They get the first chance to buy hot initial public offerings. They get to meet in person with companies' managements.

On the New York Stock Exchange, all buy and sell orders are routed through a single 'specialist,' guaranteeing that most small trades can be matched directly. But most larger trades are delivered to the specialist on the floor of the exchange by human brokers, a system that big investors view as increasingly inefficient.

The stock market to me was like a video game. When it went off, it was like turning the game off. It wasn't something I'd think about until I'd turn the machine on again.

I have always been an honest trader. I come from a school of traders where there was honour in the deal. No contracts, just a handshake and that's it, done. That's the way I prefer to do business but it's not always possible these days, sadly.

In college I started studying the stock market. I went down to the stock exchange, watched all the activity from the visitors' gallery, people running around, calling numbers, shouting, and all the paper flying and the bells ringing, and of course that was exciting, and it seemed to lend itself to my analytical skills.