Stealing the Market: How the Giant Brokerage Firms, with Help from the Sec, Stole the Stock Market from Investors - Tapa dura

Argues that large brokerage firms are earning more for themselves and less for their clients by secretly investing using insider information

The US stock markets were designed to handle a large volume of small orders for individuals who paid brokers well to do their business. Today they process a small volume of large orders from institutional investors, most of whom pay their brokers only a few cents a share. The community of brokers gets even by trading against its customers, often secretly or through hidden nominees, while the institutions are seeking new settings for trading without informing their brokers. And the SEC has proved unwilling or unable to step in and police these off-the-floor activities. We are well on the road to losing the honest and open markets that have contributed so much to our prosperity. This insidious phenomenon - the growing tendency of brokers to trade against their customers - affects the investor. "Stealing the Market" chronicles the history and implications of these disturbing changes, which burst into public consciousness in summer 1991 with the revelations of Salomon Brothers' abuse of its customers in the U.S. bond market. The author, one of this country's most knowledgeable financial journalists, introduces a fascinating cast of characters, from Leo Melamed, born in a Polish shtel, who as head of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange made some people very rich by inventing a cadre of arbitrage traders, to William J. Casey. former spymaster, who as chairman of the SEC engineered the end of fixed broker commissions. Here is a close look at the world of finance as it existed before and after the computer era - and a sober analysis of what we may have lost, financially and otherwise.