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The ultimate client himself is probably some benign, well-meaning, atavistic pensioner with few expectations beyond seeing out his autumnal years dandling a grand-daughter on his knee, watching her blow dandelion fronds around a meadow bathed in golden light. To this unitary goal he has ploughed the meagre returns of a lifetime’s manual work, spent down a pit or something, via diverse routes (stewarded by personal investment advisors who signed him up by reading a lengthy disclaimer from a playbook) into ISAs, retirement schemes, life insurance policies, and investment funds,each of whose asset managers outsource their trading functions to third party dealing desks, who hedge their actuarial delta with units in fund of hedge funds whose managers in turn invest in dynamic portfolios of actual hedge funds, who invest the proceeds borrowing securities to sell short on margin, pledging as they do the collateral to their prime brokers, who upgrade it by using it as collateral for high-credit quality bonds lent by agent lenders on behalf of the — ahh — pensioners for whom they hold those assets...
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