ETFs Are Where the Fun Is

If you are a retail stockbroker, sometimes your customers will come to you looking to do a trade. “I want to buy this Nvidia,” they say, or “this Bitcoin,” or “I want to buy the S&P 500 index and also write monthly out-of-the-money calls on it for income.” And if their idea is basically sensible you will try to help them do the trade they want to do. Sometimes this means just buying a stock for them; other times it might mean lending them money to buy it on margin, or lending them stock to short, or writing them derivatives or structured notes to get exactly the payoff profile they want.

And then other times you will go to the customers with ideas, saying “hey you should really buy this Nvidia” or “diversify into some Bitcoin” or “consider writing covered calls on your S&P portfolio.” You will do this for the obvious combination of reasons: