Blue Sheets

  

If you work for an investment company, you probably don't want to receive a Blue Sheet data request from The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

As the agency responsible for keeping an eye on brokers and dealers, FINRA might send a request for information to anyone involved in the buying and selling of securities. The requests used to be printed on blue paper, but today the questions and responses are all done online through an official Blue Sheet system.

Perhaps FINRA noticed suspicious activity, such as someone using insider information. Or a security experienced an unusually high level of volatility. FINRA might ask for the stock name, price, date of the trade, how many shares were bought or sold, and the names of the buyers and sellers. A firm or individual can be fined big bucks if they ignore the request or provide incomplete information.

So if Mike the broker gets a tip from his brother-in-law that a new cancer drug is going to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration next week, and he tells all his customers to buy the stock immediately...Mike’s firm will probably receive a Blue Sheet request. And possibly some Orange Jumpsuits.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What does a stock broker do?19 Views

00:00

finance a la shmoop. what does a stockbroker do? I've been working on the

00:08

railroad. yep that's what they do. they broker stocks to customers and while

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generally speaking. they take a commission for the privilege of selling

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shares of whatever dot-com to their customers or clients. think about stock

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brokers like you'd think about home Realtors only stockbrokers are selling [lady celebrates in front of a house's sold sign]

00:25

47 homes a day for five grand each give or take a lot. in the 1970s Commission's

00:30

paid on stock and bond trades were massive. back then there were essentially

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no connected consumer computers so processing an order was relatively

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expensive and there wasn't a whole lot of competition and it took a lot of

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infrastructure to make a trade. and there were relatively few players in the

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entire industry back then like only three or four big competitors who all

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decided to charge about the same very high commission rates .well the small

00:54

number of competitors made for a much less efficient market which meant that

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the consumer paid a whole lot more per transaction and more meant Commission's

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of 3 4 even 5% like buying a hundred shares of a $20 a share stock for 2

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grand carried a commission of something like a hundred bucks. a broker making 50 [equation]

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of these trades a day did extremely well but oh how times have changed. today a

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typical trade might carry a commission of 0.1 percent that same 2 grand trade

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today well would pay a commission of something closer to 2 bucks.

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yep you heard that right 98 percent less. so the bottom line is that there are way

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fewer stockbrokers in existence today and the ones who have survived have to

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sell a whole lot more shares or do more volume business for their customers or

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if they end up looking like this guy. so what's the daily routine ? well most

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brokers specialize in a given area of client institutional brokers

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pretentiously called sales traders. well they sell stocks to large mutual funds

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hedge funds and other major volume players the order blocks a million units

01:59

at a time and they can trade billions and billions of dollars of stocks

02:02

through one hot broker. well the demands on that brokers day are

02:05

severe and high pressured. the institutional sales trader is expected [woman frowns behind a desk]

02:09

to be up and in the office by 5:00 a.m. New York time.

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the reports from Europe and Asia leaving myriad voicemails for her customers so

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that nervous Nelly by side investors will be encouraged to place their trades

02:22

early and often with that broker. at the other end of the spectrum are brokers

02:25

for retail customers who sell just a few hundred or thousand shares at a time to

02:30

a small group of people who lovingly rely on the broker for actual advice and

02:35

are dramatically less sensitive to Commission prices should they be a few

02:39

cents a share higher or lower. that broker is a trusted party who's relied

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upon to give advice so that Ethel and Ernie Brillstein can retire in the [man frowns, as lady is excited]

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lakeside home of their dreams. so what's the money like well on the institutional

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side it's extremely volatile. in a good year a good sales trader managing a desk

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of a dozen other sales traders can and does make millions and millions of

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dollars a year. and this is great because the average tenure of that sales broker

03:05

is short .they die either in a bear market or in the form of a coronary

03:10

deliver that courtesy of the tightly pressure-packed difficult nature of you

03:14

know kind of fighting that war. well life of a retail broker is kinder

03:18

gentler and poorer. a good retail broker lasts much longer time usually and ends

03:23

up being on the get rich slow plan. such that year after year they're able to

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invest some meaningful amount of money in the stock market on their own

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watching their wealth grow at turtle pace but with thick hard shells of [investment returns sheet listed]

03:34

covering their behind. the qualifications being a stock broker well ?just be good

03:38

with people more than anything else. the deep financial knowledge that used to be

03:42

necessary for the job has all but evaporated and the job of the sales

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trader retail broker is that of regurgitating dialogue written by sell

03:50

side analysts and then synthesize by dozens of lawyers before being allowed

03:54

out of the bullpen. progress or ladder climbing happens by winning new clients

03:59

obtaining new business and increasing the dollar volumes traded through the

04:03

front desk. so yeah stock brokers broker stocks .okay that's the to long didn't

04:09

listen version. [man frowns]

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