Brad Hintz Quotations

We are probably at the point where the trading cycle is slowing, at least in North America, and it's tough to say investment banking will get better. But the retail and asset management businesses look really good. That's what's exciting to investors.

I would say they're the weakest trading house on Wall Street.

Physical pricing knowledge in crude and refined products represents the keys to the castle.

It doesn't take a lot of people to run this business. It certainly takes very little amounts of capital, and as you gain more and more assets, your margins expand.

Merchant banking remains an exceptional business for the handful of Wall Street firms that have remained in it. Unfortunately, the disclosure of merchant banking portfolio positions is weak, and forecasting these gains is at best challenging.

Trading expertise is something that you can purchase on the marketplace.

What it really says is the future of institutional equities will be more like fixed income - a business of proprietary trading and customer execution with customers evolving away form being a client and acting more like a counterparty, ... This idea of a fixed income model for equity - taking risk - seems to be working, he said.

When you are investing in J.P. Morgan, what you are really betting on is Jamie and Jamie's team, ... You are betting that Jamie's team of expense control czars are going to be able to fully integrate this business.

When you are investing in J. P. Morgan,

While we expect the operating environment to remain positive for the securities firms throughout 2006, we feel that much of this 'good news' is already priced into the brokerage stocks.

This seems to be a case of Mack wanting to put his own team together, ... Stepping back, we'll have to wait and see if Mack is only targeting heads of troubled business units or former Dean Witter people or if he's in the process of gathering an entirely new team. Only time will tell.

The story here is driven by poor trading results. Hanging on the horizon are these storm clouds that emerge from the trading business. Every quarter you are holding your breath.

(A.G. Edwards) brokers are not going to be happy about this, but they know the problems in their industry.

This is a business of reputation, and when chief executives are making M&A decisions that could affect their own career paths, they don't want to take a chance.

They're all looking for brokers. And that's a very promising sign for this year.

They're making a statement about where they think trading is going to go.

It was a pretty good quarter for most of the firms. Retail is doing very well.

I look at my forecast and, frankly, I was off by $180 million on their investment-banking side. M&A did extremely well.

Investment banking really did knock the cover off the ball. We're moving from a pretty weak performance into a better-performing business.

Investment banking is relatively easy to forecast, but the trading side is a tough one.

The hedge funds have come roaring into the commodities market, and they are willing to take risks.