does company IT track your trade/emails?

at my bank we aren't even allowed to have a brokerage account unless it's through our private bank - they are gouging me for over $20 a trade too

Everything is discoverable. Whether they take the time to track you specifically is the question. You shold assume zero privacy when on a work computer.

they see EVERYTHING, it's all stored in a server if they ever need to look back and investigate. it's expensive to track everything real-time but it isn't worth your neck

I interned at a firm my sophomore summer and split my time between Compliance and Trading (unique, unusual and a long story - somewhat informal/ less formal internship set up through a contact). Anyway, the way that tracking worked was that the company used software that captured some set percentage of sent messages and these were reviewed. These sent messages included e-mail correspondence (through company e-mail, gmail etc.) as well as messages (through AIM, facebook etc.) All messages were however stored and could be accessed if necessary in the event of an investigation.

If you want to send emails at work without the possibility of anyone reading them, don't use your computer. Use the GMail mobile web interface on your Blackberry.