Look at the names below and see if you can find a common denominator.
Kidder Peabody & Co. Inc.
Drexel Burnham Lambert
Thomson McKinnon
Prudential Bache
Prudential Securities
A. G. Edwards & Sons, Inc.
First Union Securities
See a common thread? Probably not, but all of them, if not already, are names that will no longer be in existence as brokerage firms. Amazing.
They are the names of every brokerage firm I was ever associated with, many names having changed while I was working in the same seat, wiith the same phone number, with the same manager.
One of the myriad of reasons I founded Chippewa Partners, Native American Advisors, Inc. in 1995 was because the writing was on the wall. The role of the customers man was a dying breed. Wall Street is all about Wall Street.
Ask any old salt in a brokerage firm today and he will agree with that statement. If he doesn't he is a liar. Or maybe doesn't even know what a customer's man is.
Today it is about keeping your seat, selling the investment product de jour, global scale, trying to compete with the likes of Mother Merrill herself, keeping the compliance departments happy and trying to dish out the latest IPO that was no doubt the product of some private equity deal or venture deal in the fairly recent past. The liquidity out there is amazing today and these firms trying to buy brokers and assets continues to make little sense for investors.
These deals aren't geared to make money for anyone except the honcho's at the brokerage firms.
And they are geared to separate the assets of the customers from the customer.
A.G. Edwards clients beware, If your broker hasn't pounded your account silly yet, you'll have a Wachovia product rammed onto your account statement soon enough.
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