mod (Andy) note: in honor of Carney posting this back up on CNBC today, I thought it'd be good to have it back up on WSO for those who missed it, and to keep Bankerella's groupies ("Bankerella's boys") happy

Okay, today's advice comes with a dirty little secret.

One thing a banker girl (or any 20-something single chick working 80+ hours a week in a stressful environment) needs is the ability to occasionally have some fun with with very little advance notice and with no strings attached.

(Sure, the perfect girl is a bastion of sexual morality and never dates anyone casually, but that's just not relevant here.) So as a banker chick, you need to get maximum hedonic return on the few hours you have left to yourself, and let's face it, those hours aren't enough to gently nurture a budding but delicate relationship. You need to be strategic about how you use that time, so you need to find people (or a person) who can do the same.

If you're reasonably hot, you'll have no lack of candidates for the role. It's like a resume screen: you need to apply some sort of quick initial test to focus in on candidates who are more likely to be rock stars.

So here are my rankings, based on my own experiences and the experiences of a few friends.

As a trader, one of the things I like to do is take notes on trading observations, both trade specific and trader specific. I was flipping through some of my notes and wanted to share some of the rules I have followed which generally apply to all traders.

• Develop your own philosophy and guiding principles
• Never trade on other's advice
• Define your trades before entering them and constantly reiterate your reasons
• Keep a record of your market observations
• Do not be afraid of taking risks (or losses)
• Make a risk control plan and follow it
• Accept failure and persevere

I will go into detail below, Let me know if you have any more tips that you would like to contribute.

We always argue about who makes more money, has the better lifestyle and who are generally the ones who have it made in the industry. It is almost as if the financial universe is a school of fish, constantly nipping at each other’s tail in hopes of getting ahead. Guys log unbelievable hours and put in an effective decade’s worth of work time well before they reach their thirties.

I have given up on trying to figure out whether it is worth it or not. You hang around long enough and you realize that all rules are arbitrary. Everyone defines their own rules and parameters. Nobody is ever right, there are just those who screw up less often and to a lesser extreme than others. That’s why today’s topic is not so much about who is better and a bigger success, but who is simply more fun to be around.

Slowly but surely we step towards our day of reckoning. In just over a month, the Federal Reserve will end its bond buying program popularly known as QE2 or what many of us skeptics have likened it to, using a tiny band aid to qwell a huge hemorrhage. Depending on which side of the isle you stand, you may love or hate the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing.

Investors are certainly grateful to Bernanke and company for the near two year bull market, which has seen major market players (those that survived, that is)recover from the depths of the crisis. Many critics, however, have been vocal about the structural damage that the Fed’s debt expansion policies have done to the system long term. The question we face now is, will there be a QE3?

Friday the 13th. One year and one week later, it happened again. Cannot say I am shocked. Wish I didn't know it would happen again. Surprised that it did so soon. Calmly awaiting next episode.

It is getting harder and harder for me to accept the status quo. I can't do anything about the issue, but I would like to use it as a platform for voicing what should by now be everyone's dissatisfaction with the side effects of high frequency and program trading.

66%.

That is the number of respondents who viewed Ben Bernanke favorably in a recent Bloomberg customer poll.

I guess that's a fair estimate.

I would say that 2/3 of the people I have run across in my lifetime are either brain zapped morons or self serving turduckeons. Those are pretty much the only two sorts of people I could believe would be willing to show such overwhelming support for Shalom.

In fact, Bernanke's approval ratings are currently higher than every politician in the world, other than German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Much has been made about the death of investing over the past several years. Thanks to the proliferation of quants and their burly supercomputers, we've seen average intraday stock holding periods drop to a ludicrous 28 seconds (by most estimates) and up to 70% of trading volume on a given day resulting from high frequency trading bots. These bots operate largely through dark pools, where they're given rebates and what amounts to inside information milliseconds before other market participants' trades are executed, allowing the bots to front run the trades. These advantages are considered their compensation for "providing liquidity".

We all saw just how fragile that liquidity can be last May, when the HFT crowd all closed up shop at once and the market dropped 600 points in five minutes to a level 9.2% below the day's open. Over the subsequent 20 minutes, the market roared back to close down 300 points - after having been down 1,000 points just a few minutes before. It caused a trading nightmare, with companies like Accenture selling for a penny a share, and Proctor & Gamble dropping 37% for a few minutes. Some trades were eventually unwound and disallowed. It was utter chaos. And the machines got rich.

This is something I've been meaning to bring up for several weeks now, but other topics kept taking precedence. Jerome Kerviel, the disgraced SocGen trader who was recently sentenced to two years in prison and a €5 billion fine, granted an interview with Der Spiegel which is required reading for all traders or anyone who wants to become a trader.

I know I've made a lot of jokes at Kerviel's expense, but what happened to this kid is no laughing matter. In a rushed attempt to hide managerial incompetence or worse, and to reassure investors that it was an isolated incident, Societé Generale deliberately threw Kerviel under the bus with a vengeance we haven't seen since Kidder Peabody's hatchet job on Joe Jett.

In a stunning verdict (stunning by French standards, anyway), rogue Societé Generale trader Jerome Kerviel was sentenced to three years in jail, another two years suspended sentence, and was ordered to repay SocGen €4.9 billion, roughly $6.8 billion USD. The 33-year old trader maintained throughout the trial that his superiors were not only aware of his activity but approved it.

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum today. I got a call from a successful trader friend. What made the call strange is that it happened during market hours, actually almost at the opening bell. My buddy is not only unreachable during these hours, he definitely does not want to be distracted with any kind of babble. The fact that he placed the call and was in a rather chatty mood, set a strange tone for the conversation that ensued.

Adding to the Twilight Zone feel was a Michael Lewis piece from this morning.

10/4. To military and police personnel, an affirmative acknowledgment. To investors and traders, the potential boiling point of a slow simmering feud. On this date, several high powered mutual-fund executives will convene at the Investment Company Institute in Washington D.C. and reportedly begin a push to shackle high-frequency traders .

A bit under two years ago I sat down with a few Chicago options traders. Most were joyous of the paydays they were seeing as a result of the panic. One elderly gent, had a whole different take on the situation, however. Here's what he had to say: