I worked in the sales, research, and management departments of a major regional brokerage firm for over twenty-five years. I left as a Senior Vice President to become a private money manger in 2005.
While I never literally worked on Wall Street, I lived in the air of that synecdoche.
I learned quite early in the game that, if I wanted to survive, I had to pick and choose very carefully among the investments offered to me and my clients. Many of them—such as, for instance, most tax shelters back in the 1980's and numerous mortgage-backed products—were financial poison.
Once you hung around a while, it got to be fairly easy to spot the bad products—the first test was simple: crappy investments usually had the largest commissions for the brokers.
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