Greed is like water it flows in only one direction , where the money is.
Like water which flows in only one direction where the gravitational pull is.
Frankly, I was stunned by the casualness with which financial executives seem to be willing to betray the interests of their own clients. Read the book yourself for a more comprehensive explanation, but basically what most of the big brokerage houses and banks have been doing is selling information about their clients’ buy and sell orders in advance, so that the high-frequency traders who pay them for this information can “front run” the orders, buying up shares in advance of a client’s buy, or selling them in advance of a sale.
In each case we’re talking about just a few microseconds’ worth of advance notice, not days, but it allows the computer traders to siphon off a penny or so at a time, while taking no risk at all – zero. (High-frequency traders can go for years at a time without a single money-losing day!) When literally tens of thousands of trades are executed every second, it adds up to billions of risk-free dollars per month, taken out of the pockets of a bank’s own clients, whether those clients are big institutional investors and mutual funds, or ordinary consumers trying to improve the performance of their retirement accounts.
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