flawless financial modelling/contract drafting vs ass-kissing

“won the overall prize for being top research house and I’d bet my last dollar their expense budget took a serious hammering to achieve that. That’s because when the fund managers at places like the Prudential or Fidelity fill in their voting forms the lucky winners tend to be those who took said client out on the razzle to a Michelin starred restaurant and then a high-class strip joint. I know this because, for my sins, that’s how I became the number four ranked analyst in my sector and interestingly it was the ‘status’ resulting from that ranking that resulted in certain banks foolishly deciding to pay me a disgustingly huge amount of money. It wasn’t my ability, knowledge or hard work – it was simply a product of my resilient liver and intestines.

When any client is debating about who to vote for they generally have a simple choice: the diligent boring buffoon who could compose wonderful spreadsheets and write the odd vaguely interesting research note or the bloke who didn’t know that much but sure knew how to order a bottle or seven of Chateauneuf du Pape at Quaglino’s and never had a problem barging his way into Stringfellows at 1.30am. Whilst the conscientious character slaving away every night until 10pm trying to analyze the 2014 cash-flow from some tedious company’s minor sub-division might occasionally win friends and influence people the smart money’s got to be on the vaguely charismatic piss-head who knows where to buy the best foie gras.”

Gotta love Geraint Anderson

Amazing

Alternative MBA - this is nothing short of amazing!

Investment Bankers

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

The End, by Michael Lewis

Trainees

September has tremendous potential comic value in any investment bank because this is the month when we have the pleasure of welcoming into our bosom, like lambs to the slaughter, a bunch of ambitious, hopelessly naïve, graduate trainees.

Every year we await their arrival with eager anticipation. There are two main archetypes – the terrified, deferential buffoon and the preposterous, arrogant idiot. The latter, thinking this is the best method to gain the respect of the “bear pit”, is my favourite.

Little does this schmuck know that his attitude will simply condemn him to a series of tried and tested wind-ups which should result in a major personality rethink or, more hopefully, his immediate departure. We might begin by anonymously putting him on the subscription list for a hardcore porn magazine using the office as his favoured address of receipt. If this fails to calm him down, we may use his computer to type into the in-house message system (accessible and visible to the whole bank) the domain name of a slightly “dubious” website.

Bring on the Human Sacrifice by the City Boy. Check out the rest of his column too. Awesome.

Transition

Since I’ve started school, my sleeping pattern has warped. I now sleep at close to 3am and wake up at an equally ungodly hour.

School life is a welcome change. It allows time and space for creativity to flourish, for interests to be pursued, for reading to be done at a more leisurely pace, for the chance to put my feet up with the day’s papers and a cuppa in the morning. ooooohhhh….total paradise compared to jumping out of bed after 5 snoozes, wash, change, smudge stuff on face, shovel down the food, coffee down in one swift gulp, hustle to the MRT station, fling self onto train, hop off at Raffles Place (though I don’t elbow my way out of the train in order to beat fellow passengers onto the escalator up), march through the underpass and up up up into the office, walk into my room, sit self down, drink water, peer into inbox and henceforth the day(s) unfolded.

School life has allowed me the time luxury of this blog!