The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.
— Lyndon B. Johnson
Competitive Brokerage quotations
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business.
You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
It can be argued that the U.S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management.
At nineteen I was pretty sure I was going to be a professional soccer player.
At that time I played for one of the Norwegian premier leagues. But I tore ligaments in both knees, so I started studying business administration and economics and became a financial analyst, and I worked at a brokerage firm as a stockbroker.
The growth stock theory of investing requires patience, but is less stressful than trading, generally has less risk, and reduces brokerage commissions and income taxes.
In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.
Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker.
[Adviser is] the ones who do the job very well are the ones who lay out the range of options, filter down the range of options that are available to the president, lay them out in an honest, brokerage way and then let the president make the choice among those options.
At Travelers, we were much more opportunistic.
It was very successful, but it wasn't an integrated financial services company. We had a property casualty company, a life company, a brokerage company. We were a financial conglomerate. It wasn't a unified, coordinated strategy of any sort. When it merged with Citi, that became a big issue; Citi, at that time, wasn't yet a fully integrated, coordinated company.
Brokerage firms don't sell customers stock so much as they sell those horrible mutual funds
I have always been very diversified, so I have never suffered a catastrophic loss. I spread my money around the way a large institutional investor does. I use different brokerage firms. I manage some of my accounts myself.
There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.
Brokerage firms and their executives cannot use threats regarding research activities as a way to obtain investment banking business. The threat to drop research coverage if Piper were not selected as the lead underwriter for a secondary offering was totally inappropriate and undermines the integrity of the market.
The year I turned 26, as the head of my own brokerage firm, I made $49 million, which really pissed me off because it was three shy of a million a week.