Wall Street’s Trading Desks Endure Worst First Half in a Decade

A lot of our clients work in investment banks. There’s been a long (since the election) and growing narrative that the market will correct any second now... any second. Meanwhile the market has gone up up up. Part of that, I believe, is because most of these trading desks sit in one place - NYC, a super liberal anti trump environment - so it’s hard not to buy into the narrative and go risk off which means you would have missed all the market growth. Almost everyone one of my friends that work at hedge funds have underperformed the market over the past 24 months.<p>For the market to be at an all time high, somebody is making money. The good news is that most capital exists in pension funds which are effectively owned by “the people” so most 401ks should be doing well.

&gt; And technological advancements have narrowed spreads in many areas of trading.<p>&gt; “Part of the problem is that it’s too late to hedge interest-rate volatility, there’s not currency volatility to hedge. Speculators need volatility to hedge and enter the market.”<p>Sounds like a good thing to me.<p>&gt; New rules limited lenders’ ability and willingness to make principal bets with their own money<p>Anyone know what regulation this is referring to?<p>One of Steve Mnuchin&#x27;s stated goals was to reduce the domination of the 5 mega-banks and help bring back a healthy market of smaller banks that got squeezed out by new rules added after the financial crisis. Rules that were designed with the bigger banks in mind. So I wonder how the smaller players are doing.

,,we haven’t seen a lot of people repositioning their portfolios, we haven’t seen leverage increase.”<p>Maybe people are starting to realize that changing portfolios all the time without a computer making the calculations is not the best way to make money (quite the opposite)

Dumb question: so is this about trading that the large banks arrange for their clients and get commission on? And if so, how is this problem different from MGM, Wynn, Aria complaining that Las Vegas is having a couple of slow months?<p>Why do we need the banks for the trading anyway? Aren&#x27;t there ways to handle it with technology rather than paying whatever fees the cartels want?<p>Maybe I am a little bit cynical in general about this stuff.

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oh no, jpm only got 10.7 billion instead of 12, i guess it&#x27;s time to close shop

The harder you think it’s going to be the market, the less you are going to trade. You need your confidence interval to reach a certain point before you are going to trade since you’lol have a negative expected value if you don’t have an edge (50&#x2F;50)

Off-topic discussion below.<p>This is the most vile dark pattern I have seen in recent times.<p>On loading this page, there is an auto-playing, muted video. When you press its pause button, it is unmuted and keeps playing. Only when you press the pause button AGAIN does it actually stop playing.<p>At some point when implementing that feature someone said &quot;Sure, I&#x27;m OK with that&quot;. What went wrong there?

&quot;Oh how fast the sun can drop.&quot; Pearl Jam

I&#x27;m going to lay everything I have on the line next week by trying to catch a short position on index futures by Monday morning, July 22, 2019. My guess for Sunday is a big dip down, followed by dead cat bounce for somewhere at or near the open Monday morning.<p>Sell the rallies as long as we are below ES ~8,000 &#x2F; NQ ~3,000. Would be interesting to see MSFT, for instance, take a 70%-75% haircut in the next X years. [SPX 666 &lt;- 10 years | 3,000 -&gt; ??]<p>This is not investment advice.