Send me $100 and I’ll tell you. Seems to me a good business model to place small ads and wait for the dollars to drop through the PO Box.
When I started in the City forty-four years ago the three best ways of making money were owning the business, being a floor trader or finding clients. The first was not available to me and in any case was not without risk. I worked for a private company for my first sixteen years and the owners ultimately lost out. Trading on the floor of a futures market required an agile brain, whip-crack reactions, a retentive memory and bonhomie with the other traders. I didn’t qualify. As I worked for a sugar broker and merchant founded in 1861 it had already mopped up all the clients but I was allowed to nurture a few of the smaller ones for practice. When an oil futures market opened in London in 1981 the field was open and I made hay – a double metaphor, for once not mixed. I was wholly unaware at the time that integrity, some social skills and an absence of greed appealed to new clients. It stood me in good stead until I was made redundant five years ago.
At one point I was Chairman of the Compliance Committee of the International Petroleum Exchange, as it was called then. My duties were not onerous, in fact the committee never met during my tenure of perhaps three or more years. If asked to advise how to make money in financial services today, I’d say that compliance, legal and corporate governance are all safe long term bets; should you happen to have failed as a trader there is always risk management. This is counter-intuitive as none of these activities generate any revenue but these operatives hold the whip hand over the hapless broker who generates the income on which they gorge. But if I was starting in the City today I’d still hope to end up as a broker bringing in new clients – it’s just so much more fun.
Talking of fun how about a frivolous frolic, What’s New Pussy Cat? My favourite exchange, relevant to this post is –
Peter O’Toole: “Have you got a job?”
Woody Allen: ‘I work at the striptease. I help the girls dress and undress”
Peter O’Toole: “Nice job”
Woody Allen: “Twenty francs a week”
Peter O’Toole: ”Not much”
Peter O’Toole: “It’s the most I could afford.”
The musical sign-off should be the Bare Necessities.