December 17, 2010
It seems to me that banks should be banks, brokerage firms should be brokerage firms, and real estate companies should be real estate companies. There should be companies whose sole job is to represent and do the very best they can for individual investors. One of the things that always bothered me is that bond trading desks, for example, are profit centers for their firms rather than a break-even operation within the brokerage firm to accommodate the needs of their customers. Brokers, Dealers and Investment Advisers should definitely be required to be fiduciaries, and trading operations within firms should not be allowed to compete against the very customers they claim to be representing.