4 Responses

1. Ted

   January 21st, 2010 at 2:26 pm

   1

   A stock broker takes orders to buy and sell stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc., on the market. They also frequently offer personal finance help.
   An investment banker does corporate financing. He will take a company that needs money and set up a public offering of their stock or a bond issue. They also get involved with financing mergers and acquisitions.
   Just to complicate things, many places like Merrill Lynch, have both a brokerage unit and an investment banking unit, but once you get inside brokers are brokers and investment bankers are investment bankers and never the twain shall meet. Actually, it’s illegal for them to meet, because th IB will have access to confidential merger plans that are non-public and that the brokers are not allowed to use to buy and sell stock.

2. jeff410

   January 21st, 2010 at 4:28 pm

   2

   Investment bankers underwrite stocks and bonds from the companies that issue them. Stock brokers sell them. Two different functions. In other words its like the investment banks are the manufacturers of a product and stock brokers sell the product. They dont intersect, but you have to have someone who serves both functions. Investment bankers also provide a variety of other services such as advice on mergers and acquisitions.

3. googie

   January 21st, 2010 at 10:35 pm

   3

   At the outset investment bankers did not deal in securities. They dealt with financing of apartments, housing, manufacturing facilities, factory buildings and warehouses, steamships and ocean liners highways and bridges, municipal borrowings at every as well as manufacturing inventories . Brokerage houses dealt with the trading of securities. Once the basic infrastructure was completed and demand diminished, that is when the investment banks started acquiring some of the brokerage houses for that was a source of business which dealt with cash. Today almost every investment bank owns securities dealers.

4. AlanKath

   January 22nd, 2010 at 4:39 am

   4

   I think the real question is, how are those different from a gambler’s?