Matt Levine, Columnist

Robots Aren't Quite Ready to Replace Wall Street's Salespeople

Virtual assistants will take on the drudge work, freeing up people to handle important things, like golfing with clients.

March 27, 2018 at 9:00 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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This post originally appeared in Money Stuff.

There is an expression on trading floors, "3 Go 1 Go," which is the sequence of keys that you use in the Bloomberg terminal to forward a message. It is used as a dismissive term for a certain type of stock or bond salesperson, who is imagined to just sit at his computer getting messages from his traders and research analysts and mindlessly forwarding them to his customers. When I worked at Dealbreaker, a reader once sent us a photo of a fancy car with a "3 GO 1 GO" license plate. The joke was, it can be pretty easy to get pretty rich doing pretty simple information intermediation. If your trader has bonds and your customer wants bonds and you are the only point of contact between them, you can just forward messages back and forth between them and grow rich in the process.