The 7 study manuals are excellent, I have a very good one I found in a used book store. It's out of date, but it helped me understand what was important and what wasn't. I call those guys you described "hammerheads". Brokerages have no "Here's a Nice Millionare that Needs Help and Hasn't Opened An Account Yet" lists, so one of the things that some firms do is make new guys "cold call".
I know one broker that is the best cold caller I have ever seen. This guy has two phones, and he dials with both hands. He's utterly amazing. It's unfortunate that he cannot pick stocks worth s***. But he makes more money than I am willing to tell you publicly.
I'll have to do a little expose on "commissionless trading". I remember that OLDE had an ad for that about 3 or 4 years ago. My beverage almost came out my nose.
Lots of brokers HATE coldcalling. Coldcalling is not just a stockbroker thing, when I was in college years ago I did the same thing for the police benefit league. But it's a tough way to make a living. I know another broker that has his clients up 70% per year for the past 3 years. He can't advertise that, but it's true. That's pretty friggin' good if you are running 8 million bucks. All in all, if I was not able to pick stocks, I would turn my money over to a good full service broker (a GOOD one) way before I would make picks based on an Internet guru. I've never met a broker that was good at both cold calling and picking stocks. Seems like most of them suck at both.
As far as regulation, The deal was that some Extra Large Dudes managed to take ALL the money out of the market back in 1928, (margin was 10%, no uptick rule, it was a scam artist's dream come true) and the government had to do something. What they did was create the SEC and some rules. |
