7 ms·

American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all

80 points by winanga 17y ago

tptacek 17y ago
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.
- rfurmani 17y ago
  Plus he thinks at the end that he can write "as Steinbeck did in The Grapes of Wrath" and is surprised that his book was considered "apprentice-level work", because he spent three years working on it, never mind the fact that real writers spent many years and had many false starts while honing their skills (10 years or 10000 hours to master something, supposedly)
  - davi 17y ago
    That's not what I read. The guy kept trying, despite the rejection of his first book. "My first effort was apprentice grade; I can do better." That's a good attitude to have.
- Rod 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      What about FX futures traders? ;-)
  - octane 17y ago
    > 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... This shit is just like Python vs. PHP vs. Perl vs. .NET vs. Java vs. ...
- stanleydrew 17y ago
  sorry, you're completely right.
- falsestprophet 17y ago
  Sure Michael Lewis saw wrote about a very similar situation, but he was only a salesman. He did not live the life quite like this trader. This story is similar, but a little different. If you finish reading the article, I think you will find the author has something interesting to add to the conversation.
citrik 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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).
puzzle-out 17y ago
"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.
- Maro 17y ago
  They still are...
- Rod 17y ago
  Dude, this guy was a trader. Don't insult him by calling him a "banker"!! Traders and bankers are entirely different beasts...
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - Adam503 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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..,
kingkongrevenge 17y ago
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 17y ago
  Ah, but living a happy, healthy life implies moral endorsement of the society you live in. Right?
iamcalledrob 17y ago
To be fair to the Americans, this isn't isolated to the USA.
kurtosis 17y ago
"sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it." - von Neumann
alexandros 17y ago
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.
dkarl 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
jobeirne 17y ago
>"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.

80 points by winanga 17y ago

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.

rfurmani 17y ago
Plus he thinks at the end that he can write "as Steinbeck did in The Grapes of Wrath" and is surprised that his book was considered "apprentice-level work", because he spent three years working on it, never mind the fact that real writers spent many years and had many false starts while honing their skills (10 years or 10000 hours to master something, supposedly)
- davi 17y ago
  That's not what I read. The guy kept trying, despite the rejection of his first book. "My first effort was apprentice grade; I can do better." That's a good attitude to have.
Rod 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    What about FX futures traders? ;-)
- octane 17y ago
  > 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... This shit is just like Python vs. PHP vs. Perl vs. .NET vs. Java vs. ...
stanleydrew 17y ago
sorry, you're completely right.
falsestprophet 17y ago
Sure Michael Lewis saw wrote about a very similar situation, but he was only a salesman. He did not live the life quite like this trader. This story is similar, but a little different. If you finish reading the article, I think you will find the author has something interesting to add to the conversation.

citrik 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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).

puzzle-out 17y ago

"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.

Maro 17y ago
They still are...
Rod 17y ago
Dude, this guy was a trader. Don't insult him by calling him a "banker"!! Traders and bankers are entirely different beasts...
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- Adam503 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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..,

kingkongrevenge 17y ago

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 17y ago
Ah, but living a happy, healthy life implies moral endorsement of the society you live in. Right?

iamcalledrob 17y ago

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

kurtosis 17y ago

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

alexandros 17y ago

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.

dkarl 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.

jobeirne 17y ago

>"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.