Brought Over The Wall
Categories: Regulations, Ethics/Morals
"Brought over the wall" is an employment tactic of sorts specific to investment banks.
The underwriting department pulls an employee from the reseach department. The hope is that the research employee will be able to offer special knowledge to the underwriters, and perhaps predict trends.
The employee that is "brought over the wall" is sworn to secrecy (via a confidentiality agreement). This is a way to let a bank provide both investment services and reseach services. Regulations on this practice tightened up after the dotcom boom (followed by the bust) of the 90s. It was discovered that some analysts were trading their personally held stocks in line with what they were promoting to maximixe their profits, as well as giving inside tips to their favorites.
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Finance: What is a Chinese Wall?0 Views
Finance allah shmoop what is a chinese wall Well even
the most vociferously protectionist politicians have to tip their hats
here Nobody builds walls like the chinese and check out
this thing Yeah i don't even see it from space
awe inspiring like nothing gets from one side to the
other without a whole lot of arrows in its back
in front Yeah and yeah so they just don't get
past it Period Well in wall street speak note the
wall in their wall street Yeah fine tradition of walls
in finance will chinese walls refer to the divisions between
one set of financial people at a company and other
departments of people at that same company like a big
bank might have an investment arm their own mutual or
hedge funds but they might also have a corporate finance
department which does mergers and acquisitions Well what happens if
google is about to buy netflix at a big premium
price and they've hired the bank tto help them close
the deal Well it would be illegal for the bankers
to tip off the banks hedge fund division or mutual
fund investing division so that they could front run the
deal by a whole bunch of netflix shares before they
printed up in the news and make a free you
know one hundred dollars or one hundred fifty dollars a
share or more in games Yeah that would be totally
illegal leaking inside information Yeah very illegal So a chinese
wall is put in place with just a single person
or very small group of people who sit on top
of the wall think game of thrones looking over both
sides of it and they are restricted from trading on
their own pretty much ever like In theory the chinese
wall separates the bankers from even being ableto wander over
to the hedge fund side of the world The idea
is that the sides air divvied up so that information
cannot leak through enough to allow insider trading toe happen
well in reality Sadly chinese walls often end up being
more like swiss cheese Insider trading and information leaking between
departments and companies happens all the time even and especially
when it shouldn't And unlike good swiss cheese however the
guys and gals convicted of insider trading have already gone 00:02:19.865 --> [endTime] bad Ooh