See: Wirehouse.
Take yourself back...wide dissolve...to a time when we had to wire each other through telegraph copper wires. Yes, not only is that pre-smartphone, but also pre-phone, pre-internet, pre-lots-of-things-we-take-for-granted-today.
Okay, you can come back to today now. A wirehouse broker is a broker who works for a wirehouse firm, which is just a brokerage firm that has branches. Because branches used to have to communicate with each other via telegraph wires, they used to be called (and still are sometimes) “wirehouse firms." Talk about old school.
These big'uns are traditionally full-service brokerages, which mean they offer research, investment advice, ordering, and execution of trades. The full gamut, if you will. You might have heard of some of the biggest wirehouse firms, like Wells Fargo, UBS, and Morgan Stanley.
Independent brokers used to have a hard time being taken seriously. If you weren’t with one of the big boys, people were afraid you didn’t know what you were doing, or that you didn’t know what you were doing on purpose (a fraudster). But the financial crisis of ‘07-’08 changed the fact that Wirehouse firms were all tangled up in those nasty, wrongly-rated mortgage-backed securities. They were tangled up so much that some of them (like Merrill Lynch) straight up disappeared like a coin in David Blaine’s hand. Whoosh, gone forever.
This opened up the financial field as wirehouse brokers jumped from their sinking wirehouse ships—er, firms—and looked for new ways to keep doing their thang, without the risk of being involved with those big'uns who messed up big time.
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Finance: What is a Floor Broker v. Floor...13 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is ah floor broker versus a
floor trader All right Well here's a floor fixer and
here's a floor broker but okay Shocking a floor broker
Brokers stocks on the floor of a stock exchange Right
Well here's the new york stock exchange here's its floor
These guys down here they're floor brokers That is they're
trading stocks and other securities on behalf of their clients
Basically this is the scene from trading places with eddie
murphy Great old film Old rich white guys in a
building up here Call down to their guys on the
floor who execute their bidding All right well it's a
bunch of brokers all trading their clients stocks right here
and here And here and here and here all over
the world within among each other So that money is
well pushed around thoroughly like that Cato's in grandma's hash
browns recipe Note that a floor broker is different from
a floor trader Who although he or she works on
the floor of an exchange also makes trades as a
principal for his or her own account So yeah that's
floor broker No jackhammer required Thank you very much Go
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