Michael Lewis: Be wary of brokers

They're not out to totally screw their clients, says the bestselling business writer, "but if you're listening to what brokers are telling you, they're shading the odds against you rather than for you." Why? From Tech Ticker:

The big firms have evolved since the 1980s, "away from servicing the customer and maintaining nice, happy relations with the customer to managing friction with the customer on behalf of the firms' traders," Lewis says. Since large Wall Street firms are trading in the same stocks, bonds, and other securities that they're advising institutional and individual customers about, "there's an inherent conflict of interest and you're not likely to come out of it well if you're on the other side of the desk."

Lewis, author of "The Big Short," does say that the stocks are safer for individual investors than bonds.

"The bond market I'd say is generally rigged against the individual investors," Lewis declares. "But there's a caveat. It's rigged to the extent that Wall Street firms know what they're doing. And in the last four or five years we had this episode where these Wall Street firms created a poker table where they were the fools, and as a customer you could actually do quite well being on the other side of trades from them."