

American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all - winanga
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-excess--a-wall-street-trader-tells-all-1674614.html

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tptacek
I got about 6 grafs in and stopped being able to deal with the obvious
parallels to Liar's Poker --- "I wasn't really one of them", "I'm an English
major", "training was a big frat party", "I got put on derivatives with the
big swinging dicks"...

... do I really need a third-rate rehash of Michael Lewis, when every
financial journalist out there has repeatedly pointed out how well Liar's
Poker holds up for the current debacle? Happy to hear I'm wrong.

~~~
Rod
I read the first few paragraphs, and I thought the exact same!! It reminded me
of _Liar's Poker_ right away.

 _"the derivatives traders were viewed as the elite - the baddest of the bad-
asses."_

Sounds like a bunch of baloney to me. I never heard of traders being
categorized as "derivatives traders" and "non-derivatives traders". There are
tons of derivatives contracts out there, and no one knows how to trade all of
them proficiently. What I have heard is traders being categorized as "equity
derivatives traders", "fixed-income traders", "commodities traders", etc. I
once worked at a hedge fund for an equity futures trader. He loved to bash
bankers more than anything else... but he also bashed other traders,
especially FX and metals traders, who he considered sub-human morons...

Last but not least, I have never heard of an English major trading
derivatives. Never. English majors do corporate finance, not derivatives...

~~~
menloparkbum
FX traders _are_ sub-human morons.[1] Pick up any book about FX trading - it's
all pseudo-math voodoo nonsense. They know it, too. Whereas derivatives
traders at IBs and hedge funds are math PhDs from Princeton, FX traders are at
best college dropouts and at worst former felons.

[1] former roommate was FX trader, coming from a background in bartending and
ski lift operation. Last time I saw him he was renting bicycles to tourists.

~~~
Rod
What about FX futures traders? ;-)

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dkarl
There are some aspects of this that don't ring true and make me wonder if the
story has been liberally embellished for the target audience. Most clearly,
the upper upper class in the US does not get fat -- that's for unwashed plebes
like doctors and bankers -- but Europeans _do_ connect obesity with
consumerism with capitalism. My gut feeling is that this is a sharp, ambitious
guy trying to sell a book that is more "authentic" than honest. Pretty much
the opposite of what he pretends to be.

And really, it's boring to do a cultural expose of Wall Street financiers at
this late date. It's already been done to death. _It was already done to death
twenty years ago._ We know how people act when they get that kind of godlike
money. They important part is how they get it and what the effects are for the
rest of us. The interesting thing _now_ is that there's a crowd of powerful,
connected, and ambitious people figuring out what to do next. Kinda scary, eh?

~~~
Adam503
This guy was working for UBS. The same UBS that hired Phil Gramm as their Vice
Chair.

This wasn't some multi-national corporation stuck with working with Phil Gramm
in order to make a killing in some scheme. UBS went out and actively sought
that idiot, and gave him a position of responsibility and leadership.

I have little doubt any multi-national that went out and sought Phil Gramm to
lead them was also taking all this decadence to entirely new levels.

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citrik
Wow, I've not read Liars Poker but I'm a little surprised by the comments. I
thought the author of this article really had some intense and interesting
points about the humanity of it all. Eating outrageously wasteful meals then
putting into motion the loss of jobs the next day. I think it's an interesting
if not sad window into a strange world.

~~~
potatolicious
Agreed - I never knew about the physical effect of the financial industry on
people. Yeah, okay, it was pretty obvious that they were drinking thousand-
dollar bottles of wine and ordering steaks that rival my daily (or weekly?)
salary... but I never knew about the rampant waste. It's pretty disgusting to
say the least.

You can see this from day one, really. Freshman year in college, while the
engineering, arts, and science majors were running around soccer fields doing
team-building activities... the commerce majors were getting drunk aboard a
lavish yacht on loan from an alum. Go figure, I suppose this starts pretty
early.

A close friend of mine was a commerce major... he transferred out after a year
to pursue math - he couldn't take the ridiculous egos (and he's a cocky
bastard to boot) and the "eye on the money, fuck the plebes, we're better"
mentality that his peers seemed to have.

I was pursued by Morgan Stanley and Barclay's for a while for a college
internship - I decided to go elsewhere, but even for technical roles, and even
before I was offered a job, they were boozing us up and booking expensive
restaurants and clubs in town. Glad I stayed out and did a meaningful job
instead.

~~~
byrneseyeview
Where did you go to school? At most places, business majors are people who
would be economics majors if they scored half a standard deviation higher on
standardized tests.

~~~
potatolicious
The school in question is UBC up in Canada - I didn't personally go there, but
being where I grew up, I heard plenty of "yeaaaaah free boooooze!" from my
peers who went into commerce, and "screw the preppy commerce guys" from
everyone else.

I got the impression there that "commerce" was the end-all-be-all, and that
econ majors are the people who actually _study this business thing_ (as
opposed to be awesome, network, and be awesomer, and get drunk).

~~~
byrneseyeview
I don't know. Just looking at average salaries, it seems that the econ guys
can either afford to drink more, or afford to drink better. Yeaaaaaaaaaaah
enough booze to reach the point of negative marginal utility!

And from the resumes I've seen, a business degree will leave open some pretty
uninspiring opportunities. Usually low-end stuff -- assistants with titles
other than 'assistant'. Perhaps in Canada, it's different.

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puzzle-out
"Gradually, I was descending into the strange social isolation of my
colleagues. I spent less and less time with normal people and more time with
people from the bank." I enjoyed this article, because it suggests that, for
all their occupation of what they thought to be 'the real world', bankers were
living as bubble-like an existence as a fourteenth-century monk.

~~~
Rod
Dude, this guy was a trader. Don't insult him by calling him a "banker"!!
Traders and bankers are entirely different beasts...

~~~
Adam503
Under the system in place since the Glass Steagall Act of 1933, traders and
bankers were supposed to be entirely different beasts.

The Gramm Leach Bliley Act of 1999 repealed a big chunk of the Glass Steagall
Act, commercial and investment banks were allowed to consolidate.

Since 1999, bankers and traders have been the same thing. That why the entire
financial system just came down on our heads. There was no separation these
different entities. No firewall between the speculators and the life savings
of retirees.

~~~
Rod
That is quite true, but that is not what I meant.

I can't speak for everyone who works in the financial services industry, but
when I was in London working at a hedge fund, the word _banker_ denoted
someone who did corporate finance (e.g., M&A, IPO's, etc), not someone who
works at a bank. All the traders I have met in my life loathed investment
bankers, so calling them _bankers_ is the surest way to infuriate them.

Like you said, in the old days, banks did not do trading. Back then, everyone
who worked at a bank worked in banking indeed. These days, banks do
everything. In fact, a few years ago Goldman Sachs was generating most of its
revenue via trading, not via investment banking deals. Therefore, denoting
someone who works at a bank by _banker_ is saying absolutely nothing because
the guy could be a banker... or a trader, a broker, a quant, etc etc etc.

What I meant when I wrote that traders and bankers are entirely different
beasts is that their cultures are totally different, though they might work in
the same bank. Traders like to think they're much smarter than bankers, they
work less hours, they don't work during the weekends because the market is
closed, they cultivate a culture of aggressiveness, and they can be quite
rude. Bankers on the other hand have to schmooze clients, obey more social
norms, work 90-100 hours per week, put facetime to impress their bosses, and
stare at Excel tables until their eyes bleed..,

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kurtosis
"sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it." - von
Neumann

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iamcalledrob
To be fair to the Americans, this isn't isolated to the USA.

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alexandros
I sympathise with all the human emotion in the article but can't help being
disappointed by the superficiality. Throughout the article I kept expecting a
good analysis of the situation, of the systemic biases that led to this, and
all I got was that it was the 'propaganda smokescreen of The Market' to blame.
What does that even mean? I can see why everyone finds venting at the faceless
Market as personified by the inhuman Bankers and Traders but nobody looks
deeper to give any serious responses other than 'more regulation'. So, once we
have established that people in position of power become inhuman guardians of
their priviledge, our solution is to defer to other people in positions of
power? Seriously? I think we can't afford to be this uncreative.

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jobeirne
>"I’d spent a year walking around studying flashcards with maths problems,
multiplying random licence-plate numbers in my head, just to prepare for the
interviews. I memorised The Wall Street Journal every morning."

This feels like bullshit.

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kingkongrevenge
It's all supposed to be about this corrosive environment but I mostly saw a
slightly neurotic artsy type who couldn't keep his shit together. It's not
like somebody put a gun to his head and made him eat like a pig and drink to
excess.

~~~
dkarl
Ah, but living a happy, healthy life implies moral endorsement of the society
you live in. Right?

