The Truth About the Big Boys
|One of the core pieces of Online Trading Academy’s Core Strategy is to help traders succeed by trading in the same manner and direction as the large trading institutions. Many people have questioned the ability of being able to know where these buying or selling points lie; that is until they learn the strategy and see it working for themselves.
Many people even doubt that these large trading institutions exist. We commonly think that the large banks solely engage in businesses like managing client accounts and thrive on commissions. The truth is that trading activity constitutes either a large portion or even the majority of their profits. Need proof? Well, these large institutions are publicly traded companies so one only needs to view their annual reports to see where their profits really come from.
Bank of America, for instance, made 13 billion dollars from their investment and brokerage services but over six billion from their trading activities.
Morgan Stanley’s largest income producer was in fact their trading at over $9 billion. This easily dwarfed their moneys received from investment banking or commissions.
JP Morgan Chase is known as a banking center and a brokerage, but they also made over $284 million from their trading activities.
If you have ever been involved in trading the US equity markets, you should be aware of market making activity. If you do not know what this is, you definitely need to educate yourself before risking any more money in the markets themselves. Market makers create liquidity in the equity markets by buying and selling securities for themselves and their clients. But they are also able to manipulate prices in the markets. This leads to losses from the uneducated traders who still commit money to the markets.
One of these big market makers is Goldman Sachs. We know them as an investment banking company, but as you can see from their financial information, they made over $9.5 billion last year in market making activity. This is trading!
If you think that I am just trying to promulgate an “us against them argument”, let’s check out the facts. There are scores of data points that show that the big institutions are more interested in profits for themselves than helping you secure your financial future. In fact, trading activity for these institutions has become much more profitable.
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