Here are the various ways you can ensure that, come what may, you win as a financial firm offering client advice, while also trading as a player yourself:

1. Call a market bull to your clients, but sell short in that market to make the unexpected happen in your favour. (Firm wins, client loses)
2. Call a market bear to your clients, and then buy as it falls. (Firm wins, clients get in late – if at all).
3. Use an absolutely enormous amount of money (via electronically traded liquidity pools) to steer a market in the direction you want. Then sell like mad at the top. (Clients gain, firm gains, everyone else gets screwed).
4. Do all three things in such quick succession, everyone – including regulators – is utterly in the dark about what really happened. (Nobody wins except Loyd Blankfein)

Now let’s look at the Euro today. Against every other commentator on the eurozone’s problems, Goldman and its key senior investments/currencies staff have spent every waking hour since last Saturday saying the eurozone’s problems are over. Nobody (not even the ECB, not even Merkel) thinks that is the case.

But the euro collapse stops the next day….in the US Dollar, Sterling, the Swiss Franc, the Canadian Dollar, and the Australian Dollar.

Anybody got the remotest idea why the best-looking economic outlook’s currency (Australia) and strongest fiscal State anywhere (Switzerland) should falter against the EU’s toytown money? No, neither do I: but that’s what happened. Observe at this link how, after weeks of heading north against the Euro, they all went south today.

Every other indicator – stock markets in Europe, Asia, the US and London – dropped on worries about the eurozone in general, and Merkel’s naked short-selling ban in particular.

But everything Goldman Sachs wanted to happen, happened.

And this can’t just be because Goldman is always right (63 straight trading days of profit) because it advised its clients wrongly 7 times out of 9. Now you might ask “How could they keep their clients if that was true?” and the answer is “With your own trades as 90% of corporate earnings, who gives a monkey’s chuff about the clients?”

The SEC’s first question to Goldman CEO Blankfein in session two weeks ago was “Is your first loyalty to the clients or the shareholders?” Our Loyd looked a bit flustered at that one.

Could Goldman influence a market on that scale alone? Find out why here tomorrow.