RJ and Makay

Lately, there has been a great amount of news about the upswing in hiring on the Street. While unemployment and job creation continue to remain sluggish nationwide, the financial services sector is starting to feel “bullish” about hiring again. At RJ & Makay we’re seeing cautious optimism throughout the industry regarding human capital hiring trends. We’re seeing first hand a steady increase in job orders this year, and a substantial jump in Q2 quantity over Q1.

News abounds in recent months regarding financial services hiring. Securities firms added almost 7,000 jobs in June according to BrokerHunter.com’s latest Employment Trends report. The finance and insurance industry added 15,200 new employees in June, the first increase since December. The New York State Department of Labor shows that New York just had the largest three-month increase in financial industry jobs (6,800) since 2008.

InvestmentNews has posted the top clearing firm rankings based upon their survey. The top 16 clearing firms represent 3,297 clients. Of these, Pershing (owned by Bank of New York Mellon) has a dominating 28% market share. Penson follows with 12%, and Fidelity with 9%. In fact, these 3 firms represent nearly half of the 16 firm client total. See 16 of the Top clearing firms ranked by number of brokers. The top 5 are 1. Pershing 2. Penson 3. NFS (Fidelity) 4. Goldman Sachs 5. JP Morgan. Raymond James was the last on the list at number 16.

Among clearing firm market share among the largest broker-dealers Pershing agains dominates with 50% market share. National Financial Services (Fidelity) is a distant second with 23% and First Clearing with 7%. No other clearing firm has more than a 3% market share for the largest IBDs. Read the full list with chart.