Don't trust investment banks

Michael Lewis:

As he tells Henry Blodget and I and in the accompanying video, Lewis is, in general, highly skeptical of the large Wall Street brokerage business model. “The stock market is not necessarily rigged against individual investors,” he says. “But if you’re listening to what brokers are telling you, they’re shading the odds against you rather than for you.”
Why? The big firms have evolved since the 1980s, “away from servicing the customer and maintaining nice, happy relations with the customer to managing friction with the customer on behalf of the firms’ traders,” Lewis says. Since large Wall Street firms are trading in the same stocks, bonds, and other securities that they’re advising institutional and individual customers about, “there’s an inherent conflict of interest and you’re not likely to come out of it well if you’re on the other side of the desk.”