Banking staff reduced.

Newport Beach-based Roth Capital Markets also has been reducing investment banking staff, and East Coast-based Credit Suisse First Boston is said to be reducing presence in its large Century City office, according to people in each company.

But for every sad story in the securities world, there seems to be another of survival and prosperity. Some local outfits never adopted a model that was vulnerable to a tech or tourismrelated downfall.

"We always focused on research and trading, and we never had that overhead of investment banking. As a result, we actually have been adding people here," said Bryant Riley, president of West Los Angeles-based B. Riley & Co., which researches small-cap California companies. "A year ago we had four analysts, now we have seven... a year ago we had three salesmen, now we have five salesmen."

Contributing columnist Benjamin Mark Cole writes about the local investment community for the Los Angeles Business Journal. His new book is "The Pied Pipers of Wall Street: How Analysts Sell you Down the River," published by Bloomberg Press.