Trader’s Narrative

Today, most financial companies are an endangered species. But other brokers and investment banks may be struggling and getting government bailout money to spend on bonuses, Interactive Brokers (IBKR) goes from strength to strength.

They recently reported earnings for 2008 and for the first time they broke the billion dollar mark for income (before taxes and minority interests). When you consider this was done on revenues of only $1.85 billion, you get an idea of how tight a ship they run.

I’ve mentioned before that they are one of my favorite brokers and arguably the best broker out there for the non-proprietary trader. As a customer, it’s good to know that your broker is on solid financial footing - one less thing to worry about.

If you trade with them you soon get to love their SMART routing which gets you better prices at surprising frequency. Based on independent analysis by the Transaction Auditing Group, IB’s SMART routing beats the competition. You can get the full details here.

As well, they are continuing to roll out new products and expand their already impressive market reach:

• Korean Kospi 200 Futures and Index Options (for US resident customers) soon
• National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) equity - initially to residents of India but eventually to others
• …to be then followed by NSE index futures trading
• addition of American Century no-load mutual funds

You could argue that IB is becoming a quasi-prime broker. They are a one stop shop for equities, derivatives (options, as well as futures) in more than a dozen international stock markets. And they have forex to boot. Add to that mutual funds marketplace they implemented in recent years and you’ve got a top-notch brokerage firm.

But that doesn’t mean they are the perfect fit for you. I think they are definitely worth a look if you are an active trader or have a large portfolio. But you should do your own due diligence to find a broker that you’re happy with.

Here’s a chart of Interactive Broker’s (IBKR) stock price since their IPO:

As you can see from the chart, fundamentals count… but not really

You remember the story of the Goldman Sachs trader out of London who was addicted to facebook, right? he not only spent ungodly hours on facebook but even posted a warning letter from his employer on his facebook profile!

Well, the global schadenfreude countdown has ended! Charlie Barrow has been dismissed by Goldman Sachs.

But Charlie’s friends and fans needn’t worry. He has already landed on his feet with several offers from market making firms in Chicago. They hope that, properly guided, his addiction prone personality can be the killer edge to take money from their clients.

And Charlie has learned his lesson. His new diligence can be seen here as he practises his pit hand gestures. Here he’s ‘bidding’ on 4 vodka martinis.

I started getting invites to join social networking sites around 2000. I think the first one was from a friend who had joined Orkut. Then others followed, Hi5, myspace, friendster, facebook etc. I can’t remember the rest of them. While I politely turned each invite down, I couldn’t help but feel like a curmudgeon.

I just didn’t see the point of joining a site and then spending hours and hours each day sharing with the world what I was doing, eating, wearing, etc. or putting up pictures from parties or whatever. If I wanted to share something with friends I could just, you know, call them. Or email them. The other thing that made me think twice was the whole issue of privacy.

Anyway, here’s a guy who got sucked into the whole social networking thing big time. Apprently he is a trader working for Goldman Sachs in the UK. He spends upwards of 4 hours a day on facebook and is so gone that when he got a warning from Goldman Sachs the first thing he did was put it up on his facebook page.

“It’s a measure of how warped I’ve become that, not only am I surprisingly proud of this, but in addition, the first thing I did was to post it here, and that losing my job worries me far less than losing facebook ever could.”

Its a bit creepy that Goldman’s IT department spies on their employees. But I really wonder if this is a hoax. Goldman Sachs did not get to where it is by hiring guys like Charlie.

Via TechCrunch