"We Are Doneski Gorgeous!" - How Bond Trading On Wall Street Really Works

For many years one of the best jobs on Wall Street in terms of a mix of job safety and compensation, was to be a fixed income trader-cum-salesman working for a major bank with a deep balance sheet, which could hold illiquid securities on its prop account, to dispose of as the "flow" (or clients) required, and on unsupervised and unregulated terms that were simply a verbal arrangement between the bank trader and the end client, usually a counterparty trader working for a major institutional buyside shop, including mutual or hedge funds. Since for the most part, the buyside traders operated with other people's money, they were largely indiscriminate on the fine pricing nuances of the acquisition (or disposition) of the securities at hand, and while to the "other people's money" under management whether a given bond was bought for 55 or 55.75, or a given MBS was sold for 72-6 or 72-16 mean...