Whenever a major financial market crash occurs, why is it that (as shown in movies) the stockbrokers are shitfaced at the end? The investors should be fucked right? Why the stockbrokers, who just buy and sell for the investors?

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Whenever a major financial market crash occurs, why is it that (as shown in movies) the stockbrokers are shitfaced at the end? The investors should be fucked right? Why the stockbrokers, who just buy and sell for the investors?

In: Economics

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Rich Americans don’t have all their money in stocks. A genuine billionaire would have real estate investments and some cash. Also T bills. Millions in cash. Artwork. The Star of the Ocean. They probably have far less than 50% of their wealth in stocks. If they sell stocks at a loss, they get a tax write-off.

Stockbrokers are rich when their clients are rich. They will be blamed for the crash. The Big Short guys anticipated the crash. Why didn’t you?

Basically the stockbrokers just lost their careers.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The brokers are heavily invested in the market themselves, and their job and pay is conditioned on them doing well in the market and the company they work for is widely high invested, not just for others but for themselves. They just lost tons of money, the company they work for lost money, and they are probably getting fired for losing so much money, and since their skill is being a good broker, well, thats over.

Brokerage firms generally have insane amounts of money invested in the market both for outside investors, and themselves.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Many of the traders on the exchange floors are trading their personal accounts or for their small firms whose business is investing. Only some are neutral traders just executing trades for others. But even then, tyically the investment banks are also trading their own accounts, too, as well as client money.

Anonymous 0 Comments

1) they will have spent the entire day being yelled at by investors, and know there are more days like that ahead, and that’s rough. The investor who made zillions of dollars in the 2008 crash ended up leaving the investing business because he was so traumatized by all the yelling and abuse and stress, and he *made a lot* of money.
2) they’re investors too and so may have lost their savings
3) they’ll probably lose their job

Anonymous 0 Comments

Brokers can actually be liable when their client goes bankrupt.

Especially for shortselling they can end up on the hook when their client has no money to return the stock they borrowed for them.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The investors are the ones who are paying tho brokers salaries. It is not unusual for brokarage firms to scale down their operations when investors lose money because there is less money going around. Especially the brokers who lost more of the investors money then others. And that is assuming the investors will not just sue their brokers outright for losing their money. Or the investors may go bankrupt with outstanding debt to their brokers. But you are right that the stockbrokers are not the ones with the most to lose and will usually not be the ones who are first in line at the window. Both individual traders and fund managers have a lot more to lose on the stock exchange.