Is there a way I can buy the 30 year swap for my personal account? Right now the 30 year swap is trading at ~4.03...I'd love to make a long term bet where I pay out 4.03% fixed rate and receive floating. The irony is that while I work for a bank and can make that bet in size on my book, I want to do it for personal account and have no idea as to where/why the mechanics of how it would work. Would the account get marked to market/margin called? Is there a way I can buy that swap for straight cash (not sure how this would work, as how could a counterparty take on someone's personal credit risk?).

MarketFilter: Got any advice for trading Futures? Help a newbie! I've entered the BP trading game . which is a virtual futures trading game for university students. According to their site, I'll be able to trade live futures prices for ICE Brent Futures and ICE Gasoil Futures over a period of a few weeks. I've got some idea what to look for when trading stocks (PEs and other bits of fundamental analysis), but have never traded futures before. Have any of you guys got any advice?

What are some great, informative sites/forums related specifically to trading/investing in/selling metals? Apparently metal is where it's at now that the dollar is dropping. I know little to nothing about finance and trading, etc. - but my boyfriend does and he's getting into metals trading/futures/whatever you call it. He needs to bone up a bit on his knowledge of the particular subject, but I'd also like to support him by learning about the stuff myself. This whole question is probably worded incorrectly, so you should realize that I personally am a complete novice. I'd like to be able to talk to him about his work.

Help me ascertain the correct job title for a character I’m writing who deals in high stakes international finance. Difficulty level: I have a limited understanding about stocks, bonds, or securities. Hi there—now there are several plot points that can’t be changed that I must work around, so it would be a great help to find a job title/description for this character that fits the following constraints. The character I’m writing needs to be a high-paid person in finances, the type who might get sent down to Argentina in the months immediately preceding the 2001 Corallito/2002 Bankruptcy in order to broker some sort of high-stakes financial deal involving a US firm (hers) and an Argentine company of some sort.

I'm looking to become a trader in Canada, and need some ideas on how to go about it... I'm just finishing my final year in the Business Admin / Finance program at Sheridan College (www.sheridaninstitute.ca) and have already completed the first of two exams required for the Canadian Securities Course. I will be done the second exam at roughly the same time I finish my program at Sheridan. And with the CSC, it will be fairly easy for me to secure a job with any number of Canadian banks in a retail branch location doing sales work. But I want to become a trader in Toronto, and am not entirely sure what it'll take to go about it.

UKSharesFilter: Some of my relatives have had a small selection of the shares in an inherited portfolio disappear over time from their online tracker, so my question is what has happened to the following stocks: CHB.L; GAA.L; MFBUEUGI.L and MFBUTRU.L, and should they have received any notification, documents or even cheques, (and what can be done about finding out more)? (I should clarify that they still have the certificates and haven't sold, traded or otherwise physically disposed of them, it's the listing themselves that now come up as 'No Such Symbol' on the internet listing of the portfo