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Let's pause for a moment, if the lightning pace of high-frequency trading permits us to do so. In the U.S. today, high-frequency, electronic, computer-aided trading accounts for as much as 65 percent of all stock-volume activity. Computers whiz and hum.  Black boxes send out trading orders in thousands and millions of shares, and rout orders to exchanges and "dark pools" all over the globe. Execution occurs in fractions of a second. Algorithms and programs determine what to buy, when to buy, when to sell, when to buy and sell at the same time and on which one of a dozen or more electronic exchanges. Algorithms provide guidance on volume, prices to show, prices to execute, and prices, if only for a few seconds, to report as "bids" or "offers." High-frequency traders dart in and out of trading positions in seconds. Some firms buy in one venue and sell in another. They earn pennies per share, but generate large profits via big volume--tens of thousands of...

Goldman Sachs leads; everybody else follows. Or most everybody else. So it has been for the past couple of decades in how corporate and investment banks structure themselves and recruit, develop, promote and pay for talent. And so it has been in how banks--from Goldman to regional banks involved in corporate banking and foreign banks that set themselves up on American shores--organize banking units. Traditionally since the 1980s, most corporate and investment banks (including also their trading, cash-management and processing units) recruit finance professionals into the following "programs," "classes" or "levels": 1. Analysts (those with BA or BS degrees) who join a two-three-year program and who virtually learn from scratch financial analysis, accounting, capital markets and banking on the job, while toiling away long hours doing the dirtiest of work for banking teams (spreadsheets, analysis, projections, document preparation, document printing, research...

Someone asked me QE3 announced during the market peak, will the stock price go higher? To answer the question, let us understand what QE means. QE stands for Quantitative Easing. It is a kind of monetary policy that increases the money supply in the fin ancial institutions, so that the financial institutions have more funds at lower cost for lending. The key here is "more lending", so that consumers borrow money to spend and firms borrow money to invest, all these will drive at more econo mic activities and finally reflects in the GDP figures. Hence, whether QE3 will work depends on the will ingness of the consumers and producers to borrow money to expand their economic activities. Let's take a look at the following charts: The first chart is the US consumer confidence index. We can see the general improvement in the confidence level in the consumer sector. However, the US business confidence (Chart 2) is rather weak with figures below 50 for the last 3 months. This may m...