Those in the financial industry involved with the production, marketing, and the sale of bonds, forex, stocks, and other financial instruments constitute the sell-side.
Products and services produced by the sell-side are geared towards those who on the buy-side.
You can think of the sell-side and buy-side like a coin, you cannot have one side without the other.
The sell-side is comprised of individuals, firms, fintech companies, and market makers, who are responsible for providing liquidity in the market.
Providing analysis and market insight for the buy-side, the sell-side attempts to secure the highest price rates for every financial instrument supported while any entity that purchases stock resides within the buy-side.
What Makes Up the Sell-Side?
In the foreign exchange market, multinational banks like JP Morgan, UBS, and Citibank compose the sell-side while the trading rooms for these banks are segmented into two groups.
The first group is made up of interbank traders who purchase or sell large currency sums of currency on the forward and spot markets.
Conversely, the second group is comprised of marketers who sell securities to clients on the buy-side, such as mutual and hedge funds and large businesses.
In the stock market sell-side, investment banks sell stocks to both institutional and retail investors, take trading positions, and underwrite stock issuance.
This means that they raise investment capital in the form of both equity and capital debt for entities who issue securities.
Initial public offerings (IPOs) are one of the most anticipated events for the sell-side of the stock market.
Th bond market sell-side has been pretty much monopolized by investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
Banks that underwrite and service bond issues is a joint commercial single holding company of both Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan Chase, who also are the primary dealer of U.S. Treasury Bonds while these banks are quite active with the purchasing and trading of the bond market.
