For many years one of the best jobs on Wall Street in terms of a mix of job safety and compensation, was to be a fixed income trader-cum-salesman working for a major bank with a deep balance sheet, which could hold illiquid securities on its prop account, to dispose of as the "flow" (or clients) required, and on unsupervised and unregulated terms that were simply a verbal arrangement between the bank trader and the end client, usually a counterparty trader working for a major institutional buyside shop, including mutual or hedge funds. Since for the most part, the buyside traders operated ... Read More