Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Broken_Clock who wrote (103200)	1/20/2006 3:06:45 PM
From: Knighty Tin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

Good story. I can't really say the firm did me any harm. My lips got all swollen from biting them to keep from speaking up at meetings, but I could have checked my brain at the door and solved that problem myself. Still, every once in a while, a dog has to bark. Sometimes a guest speaker at a meeting would ask me what I thought. You could hear my branch manager make a sound like he'd just been punched in the stomach. Leave me alone and I will not tell you what I think of what you are saying. But ask me, I won't lie. And I am just not real good at saying negative things tactfully. <G> Also, I decided to make futures a focus of my business. I didn't expect any support, but I also didn't expect so much opposition. The firm did not have an approved canned seminar for futures, so I created one. Like a good apparatchik, I sent it to my branch manager, who sent it to New York. It came back with, "we don't want to encourage this kind of business." So, I created one for options with the same results. Also, I had no backup for much of what I did. Neither my assistant, nor any of the other assistants is licensed to trade futures in my absence. The few brokers who have the licenses are scared to death of them, and I felt bad asking them to back up my accounts. The former head of Operations was pretty good with futures, but she got a better paying job at a larger branch. No backup cut into my vacation plans. Severely. Essentially, the branch, and the firm, didn't want to do the business I did, but they let me do it because they knew I wouldn't get them in trouble. Still, they were hoping I would convert to doing nothing but asset allocation with mutual funds and managed money. Which wasn't going to happen. Oddly, when the hurricanes hit Florida and Lousiana, the big branches in those states had their futures trades forwarded to me. But, the lesson of "hey, we gotta have a few people who do this stuff" got translated to "we need to wind down this business." On options, I was consistently explaining my trades to Compliance in the branch, region, division and New York. I was never accused of anything and they never found any fault, they just didn't get it. For example, just yesterday, I was instructed to warn a client that his options were 25 points out of the money and that he was taking huge risk. My explanation that "short puts that are out of the money are good things. The client has made 98.7% on that position and will have made 100% on Saturday. If I call him and warn him, he will laugh at me and I will laugh at me, too" didn't go over well. <G> What is funny is that I think in the next 5-10 years, the brokerage firms will be chumming for anyone that can do these kinds of trades. But now is not the time.