Claim f7e7cb86Checked 09 Jul 2026
FalseOn the truth scale
“50-year-old money-brokers can’t do it any more.”
Reasoning & Evidence09 Jul 2026
The claim is too absolute. In 2011, the UK Treasury Committee’s evidence from the FSA said that among financial advisers — a group that included people working in banks and stockbrokers — 11% were aged 55–59 and 12% were 60+, with 18% of advisers at IFA firms aged 60+; that directly contradicts the idea that people around 50 ‘can’t do it any more.’ (publications.parliament.uk) The same year, a Government Office for Science report said UK trading in shares and other financial instruments was already carried out through computerised, screen-based systems, which also undercuts the suggestion that the work becomes impossible at 50. (gov.uk) Sources: House of Commons Treasury Committee, ‘Retail Distribution Review - Treasury’ (Parliament) (publications.parliament.uk); Government Office for Science, ‘Computer trading: liquidity and trading costs’ (GOV.UK) (gov.uk)
From article
The pressure of being a market-maker in a busy market, when you’ve got people all around you screaming and shouting at you and you’re dealing in numbers and it’s like that, that, that, that – that’s pretty pressurised. That’s why it’s a young man’s job. You don’t get many 50-year-old money-brokers: they can’t do it any more. Goodness me! It’s not an easy job. Not an easy job.
When I joined the City, it was the dying days of a gentlemen’s club: magnificent, socially wonderful but going nowhere – there was still a whiff of P G Wodehouse about people who toddled off to the City all day and did things that nobody understood at all. But what I saw in the Eighties and Nineties was London becoming in many ways a genuine global centre for entrepreneurial flair, for innovation, for very hard work – and for creating profits. And without those profits we can’t have the schools and hospitals we need in this country – it’s very, very simple. I am absolutely not conflicted in any way at all about the fact that what we did, overall, was for a social good.
Sources opened+ 53 search hits considered
| [1] | publications.parliament.uk |
| [2] | gov.uk |
| [3] | gov.uk |