ZH> The Beginning Of The End For Wall Street's Various Prop Trading Desks
It appears that prop trading could soon be on its way out. Luckily, it only accounted for "just over" 10% of Goldman's revenue: it will therefore likely not be missed. Bloomberg writes: "President Barack Obama tomorrow will offer new proposals on limiting the size and complexity of proprietary trading systems as a way to reduce risk-taking, a senior administration official said." While this is not yet the formal end of prop trading which may or may not be a legal way to take advantage of the commingling between flow and prop trading, thus scalping clients in a perfectly acceptable manner (define the word "acceptable"), it has all the makings of the beginning of the end. And, much more importantly, this marks the long-awaited beginning of Glass-Steagall's return.
So with a delay of about six months since Zero Hedge started pounding on the topic of prop trading as the last bastion of perfectly legal front-running, which co-opts clients into "efficient" flow execution with the few remaining monopolist entities left on Wall Street in exchange for assorted prop trading desks taking advantage of complete flow visibility (i.e., the hedge fund nature of all modern Wall Street bail out recipients) which is simply a way to run alongside (or in front of) whale orders, thus providing guaranteed and risk free returns, the administration has finally realized what we have claimed for many months: that prop trading is nothing but a quasi-illegal operation, which was made explicitly and perfectly permissible with the adoption of the disastrous Gramm-Leach-Bliley act. As long as prop trading exists, Goldman (which is reporting earnings tomorrow, and we expect will announce another quarter of 90%+ profitable trading days only thanks to it taking full advantage of a thorough visibility of the FICC and equity flow market and a commingled prop and flow order book) will have record earnings, until such time as the Minsky Moment in Goldman's balance sheet arises again and blows up the financial system one more time.
Let's recap some of the milestone in our analysis of prop trading:
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