Soft Commissions

Categories: Trading, Banking

See: Soft Dollars.

Money managers trade big blocks of stocks (and bonds) and pay big blocks of commissions on those trades. But they don't always pay in cash. In fact, a whole "barter" system has evolved, wherein a semi-scrupulous money manager might say to a brokerage, "Hey, I have 10 million shares of MSFT I want to sell; you'd normally get a 3-cent-a-share commish, but in this case, I don't want to write you a check for 300 grand; instead, I want 'free' rent in your semi-empty office building for 2 years, which has a market rate of about 300 grand. Deal?"

Softly paid. Not in cash.

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Finance: What are Hard Dollars v Soft Do...4 Views

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Finance a la shmoop what are hard dollars versus soft dollars? okay can we

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make the joke about soft dollars that took viagra no okay all right we won't [Dollars take pills of viagra]

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or maybe we just did okay well whatever so there really is such a thing as soft

00:19

dollars in fact they apply to the manner in which stock brokerages and other

00:23

service vendors to the buy side are paid on Wall Street well on any given trade

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there are somewhere between three and twenty different sellers at the price [Sellers appear]

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the same price like a mutual fund wants to buy a million shares of Disney at 103.34

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and yes for a stock like Disney, Goldman is selling Morgan is

00:41

selling JP Morgan is selling in a gazillion other small banks all around

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the world are selling all at the same exact price well the mutual fund wants

00:49

to do the trade in one block of a million shares not doing little business

00:53

with everyone so they're gonna trade with one bank why would they choose any

00:56

one bank over another? well usually the quality of the banks research or values

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add contribute to who wins that million share trade with the three center share

01:06

Commission for a nice thirty grand pay day but what if the Wall Street mutual fund [Stock market graphs appear on computer screens]

01:10

wanted to purchase specialized trading computer terminals from Bloomberg well

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why wouldn't Bloomberg begin their own trading operation trading stocks

01:19

brokering them and selling them and all that stuff with very little incremental

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capital cost to Bloomberg above what they already do for a living and then

01:28

they themselves Bloomberg offers a million shares of Disney and 103.34

01:32

Well the mutual fund wants to buy 30 grand worth of computer [Computer terminals appear]

01:36

terminals for its traders and it would prefer to not have to write a check in

01:40

cash to buy those so in fact common practice on Wall

01:44

Street is to use yes soft dollars which is kind of another

01:48

word for barter where in the Wall Street firm trades the trade of those million

01:53

shares of Disney to Bloomberg in return for the $30,000 worth of computer

01:59

terminals they soft dollar purchased them and had they paid cash it would

02:04

have been called a hard dollar transaction got it and if your dollars

02:07

are too hard well may we recommend a better moisturizer [Stack of cash with a tube of moisturizer appears]

02:11

soft dollars, hard dollars...

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