Damn, It Feels Good To Be a Banker

by Leveraged Sellout

  3. The energy here is incredible. Walk on Rush Street on a summer afternoon, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Awesome restaurants, shops, and beautiful women everywhere.

  POSTED BY CHICAGO RULES, JUN 19, 1:48 P.M. & NOV 13, 1:53 P.M.

  Where is Chicago located exactly?

  POSTED BY LSJU, SEP 11, 5:52 AM

  Living large here in CAR (Central African Republic). Incredible women—kind of hard to communicate with them, though, b/c I have no French, and my Sango is pretty elementary.

  Last week I traveled to Lagos (business class!) to pitch Avante Capital on the privatization of the Dzanga-Sangha National Park. Stayed at the Lagos Hilton!

  No bottle service here in Bangui, but I bought a couple of bars with part of my last paycheck. I reserve the entire joint whenever I want to head out with the lads.

  Then we get our crew to bring in a load of hot women. There are over eighty ethnic groups in CAR, so we mix it up to keep things interesting—Tuesday is Baya Ladies Night, Wednesday is Banda, and so on.

  Personally, I think the M’Baka and Yakoma chicks are the hottest, but that’s just me.

  POSTED BY BALLER ANALYST IN BANGUI ON NOV 27, 1:55 PM

  i’m out here drilling eskimo chicks on the north pole. pitching the russians on an uzi factory. i’m the coolest dude on the island, flying in grey goose for all the hos pimping it up cold as ice in my iglu.

  POSTED BY BALLER ANALYST 2 ON NOV 29, 3:12 AM

  All comments are real and unedited.

  * * *

  CASE STUDY: THE SHITSHOW

  A friend relates a story of what happens to those who forget their places in life.

  I work in Private Equity at DLJ Merchant Banking. You may be familiar with the name from Monkey Business—Credit Suisse was hip enough to pass the infamous title of its acquisition to its most elite group, and we make sure to rub it in everyone’s faces. I’ve been there about a year, and it is pretty much living up to everything I’ve been dreaming about since I was a young chap in an overcoat, freezing in the cold New England winters at Deerfield. Anyway, whatever, forget about me.

  The point here is somehow this guy landed a job here straight out of consulting. How bush league, right? What’s next? Accountants, auditors, Chinese gold farmers? When I heard we were hiring someone from Bain (or maybe it was McKinsey or BCG—anyway, one of those “I couldn’t get a job in finance” places), I thought, Maybe he’s pedigree? Maybe he’s a Rockefeller? But no, I checked my trusty pocket-sized Social Register, and his surname didn’t appear anywhere. How curious.

  I soon found out that this guy was more than just not pedigree. Josh (that’s his name) was a skinny little Jewish dude from Jersey with a lisp. He had an awkwardly receding hairline and talked—stammered rather—like he was twelve, making up an excuse why his socks were always stuck together. Let’s forget about the schmo’s God-given features, get this—on his second day, Josh comes in to work at like 9:10, and he’s rocking tan khakis and a long-sleeve polo. I swear I almost fell to the ground laughing when I saw those hideous pleated monstrosities and that shitty lint-infested, vertically disintegrated manufacturing-made shirt. What a doofus.

  Bro, I know you made only like $55k traveling to Bumblefuck, Idaho, every week to provide “strategic insight” and “thought leadership,” but please, at least go to TJ Maxx and get some slightly imperfect Brooks Brothers. Get on eBay or something and buy that shit used for God’s sakes. Yes, your mom and your broke-ass girlfriend both got you gift certificates to Banana for Christmas, but that doesn’t mean you wear that middle America shit to work, son! This is FI-nance. FI as in “FIx me a drink, Jeeves.” FI as in “FIlling my wallet with Benjamins.” FI as in “FIckle with my private jets.” Not FI as in “FIt really well when I tried it on at the mall in Piscataway.” Ugh.

  Whatever. Apparently, dude must have made sense of all our glares and cough-covered laughs or someone must have taken him aside and informed him there are no “casual” days around here, ’cause Josh shortly thereafter managed to find some passable, yet still vomit-inducing (Men’s Wearhouse or some shit), clothes.

  But then, a few days passed…and Josh didn’t really do anything too stupid. I guess I was starting to come around. I started to think maybe I ought to give ol’ Joshua a shot. I figured, maybe consulting isn’t all aligning boxes in PowerPoint and “value-adding” and ocean-boiling and ass-pounding. Maybe there was something more to it than lopsided pyramids and uninterpretable charts. But boy was I wrong…consulting really must be some serious horseshit.

  Let me explain. Josh sits next to me, and I can see his screen. On around his sixth day, homeboy gets his first real assignment (some trivial EBITDA bridge analysis for a portfolio company), and he loads up the E (Excel), and tries to start getting to work. The stench of this kid’s cluelessness was worse than the smell of the refrigerator in my Korean friend Matt’s house—and kimchi smells horrendous. You could spot dude’s lack of comfort from miles away, so it was actually physically painful to me at only three feet. I watched in horror as Josh busted out some dirty old hideously colored model to build off, and nearly passed out when I saw him start navigating.

  Get this…HE WAS USING THE MOUSE!!…WTF?! I nearly shat myself with incredulity. I was so embarrassed that he was my colleague that I almost went and told one of the partners about the act of blasphemy I had just seen and that I would quit if some action wasn’t taken. But I restrained myself. I had to calm down. I turned back to my computer, loaded up ESPN.com, took several deep breaths, and let myself get hypnotized by the ever-flashy Flash advertisements. After a moment, I knew what I had to do.

  I turned and tapped Josh on the shoulder to get his attention. I didn’t say a word, but my face said, “Yo…yeah you, McPoser.” We locked eyes. I slowly and dramatically reached for my mouse cable. Staring him down, I methodically unplugged it from my computer’s USB port. The cable came out slowly but smoothly and with its final, climactic release, I heard Josh gulp with fear.

  I continued to glare at him as I started to “fly around.” My eyeballs burned through his unweathered, sixty-hour-a-week-when-he-should-have-done-ninety face as I hid and unhid sheets and conditionally formatted and applied validation to cells with triple-nested conditional and indirect functions and then culminated by on-the-fly writing a macro that took my data and made it in to a Marimekko (and we don’t even use that shit!). I never turned to look at the screen, and my eyes never left his.

  “Welcome to PE, bitch,” I growled, crunching the last word as if making radio noises. Then, mildly irritated that I had revealed my lame TiVo-watching habits but proud of my masterful display, I turned back to my computer.

  As I resumed my modeling, I could hear his hurried breaths, shaky and intermittent, and I knew that I had proven my point. Josh might have “exceeded expectations” at finger painting and storytime over at True North, but his career in PE was:

  PERFORMANCE REVIEW #3

  1. Circle all the improper Banker fashion aspects of the following image:

  2. Someone tells you that you are in a Banker city, but people are playing beer pong, even at the “nicest” bars. Where are you?

  The Correct Answer

  3. You have worked late but do not have a voucher for a car home. Do you: a. Take the subway.

  b. Take a cab.

  c. Sleep under your desk and take a car the next day.

  The Correct Answer

  4. Which one of these is not like the others? a. Liar’s Poker

  b. Monkey Business

  c. Atlas Shrugged

  d. Freakonomics

  e. When Genius Failed

  The Correct Answer

  5. West Coast: East Coast :: Sell Side: ________

  The Correct Answer

  Entertainment

  FACT #13

  Best book ever: The Unquestionable Tightness of Banking.

  Diversion

  BANKING IS A rather consuming lifestyle. As such, Banker “free time”
is limited and must be exploited fully when available. Bankers aren’t like regular people who consume all forms of diversion; no, we are much more aware of what we like and don’t waste our time “exploring” and messing around with other, trivial nonsense.

  The track for Bankers generally goes: (Prep School/High School) → (Ivy League) → (Investment Banking) → (Private Equity / Hedge Funds) → (Greatness), and in between the legs of this process, we’re blessed with several purely carefree months of joblessness. I have a nice hiatus coming before I start my new job in PE, and with several hundred K of my Bonus in the Bank, I’ll travel across Europe, stopping only to pick up models and hang out on my buddy’s yacht in Turkey. I’ll wake up whenever I feel like it, hit the gym twice a day, and do whatever else seems like appropriate unemployed behavior until I start my new job and continue along my noble path.

  Until then, I’ve basically got Sunday afternoons, when I grant myself a few hours to idle about. I usually sit on the couch with my laptop opened to Economist.com and browse the site casually, spotting relevant articles and critiquing their theses. At the same time, I bring up my DVR guide and look over the shows I have been too busy to watch.

  TV Shows

  TV is the most prole form of entertainment, but it allows me to “slum it” for a second, albeit in HD. In these moments, I feel like I’m tucked away in the asshole of America, eating microwave dinners and watching Lost with my ugly wife. Seconds into the reverie, I kill myself.

  I review what I’ve got recorded and why I feel that I, as a Banker, connect with the shows:

  Grey’s Anatomy: Details the lives of those in medicine, an industry less thrilling than Banking, but it’s entertaining for the fact that medical interns work just as hard as Analysts but get paid $30k a year and have to wear ugly blue jumpers.

  The Sopranos: Mob boss Tony Soprano is obviously an instantly accessible character. His daily management issues and ruthless business tactics echo my own corporate lifestyle. This otherwise subtle connection is made overt in season six, episode four, when Paulie says, guido as ever: “Did you even know what your EBITDA is? Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization—gives the true picture of a company’s profitability.” Hell yeah, it does, Paulie!

  Entourage: I look at Vinny Chase and I see myself. We both dominate our respective industries. He’s slightly less sophisticated and pulls somewhat less attractive females, but our charm and level of confidence are on the same level. “Turtle!” I scream at my rotund Trader roommate, Jon, and he obediently pokes his head out of his room.

  Sex and the City: Confirms to Banker guys that we’re the only males women really desire, and confirms for the Banker Chicks that they indeed have nothing in common with normal females.

  Gossip Girl: Affluent private school kids on the Upper East Side of Manhattan do cocaine and party in hotels owned by their parents. Also known as Wall Street: The Early Years.

  Web Sites

  While I’m deciding what to watch, I browse through a few other Web sites: Dealbreaker.com and Dealbook for some relevant finance snark; WSJ.com to check in on my boy Rupert Murdoch’s daily musings; and the Drudge Report to see how our “make a difference” think tank brethren in D.C. are holding up. The comments on leveragedsellout.com are particularly insightful today, but I end up on ESPN.com, where I confirm that my Fantasy Football team is still the greatest ever—Excel skills have many powerful applications.

  Film

  Nothing on my DVR engages me, so I consider popping in a movie. Scarface? Not really feeling the rags-to-riches story right now. Maybe American Psycho? A decent documentary. Wall Street? Perhaps, but I need something more relevant; the highly fictionalized themes of greed, corruption, and insider trading are no longer present in finance. Neither are Gordon Gekko–style suspenders.

  I settle on 300—superficially a story about the Battle of Thermopylae. I, however, understand it on a more allegorical level: We Bankers are Spartans waging daily war to protect our utopia from the invading savages. Whether it’s a restructuring model for a multinational company or a massive pierced rhinoceros, I know we’ll take it down.

  I toss in the DVD and fast-forward to my favorite scene. Having just quizzed the Arcadians to unimpressive responses, King Leonidas looks back upon his company of men and screams: “WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSION?” And in my mind, the somewhat unintelligible gruff response is, in unison, “BANKER!”

  I spear the air with my remote control.

  But after only a few minutes, I grow bored of inactivity, and I get up and see that my roommate Jon is preparing to go golf. I leave the movie running and head into his room to check out the new clubs he bought for himself after a careless trading error turned out to be rather profitable for his group.

  His room is messy. Blue shirts carpet the floor, and a Gatorade bottle full of dip spit sits on his desk next to an old baseball cap. His clubs are nice, though, especially his new Scotty Cameron. I pick it up and lazily putt a Morgan Stanley golf ball into an American Stock Exchange mug, and we joke about how the Amex is too shitty for anyone to ever drink from.

  Along with squash, golf is one of the true Banker sports. Though it’s now somewhat of a bourgeois game, I figure those accountants and high school gym teachers aren’t really playing golf, they’re just going through the motions and barely breaking eighty from the ladies’ tees.

  The Sales and Trading guys and the Buy Side hit the links a bit more than I do currently, but I relish any opportunity to breathe fresh air, smoke cigars, and flex wealth on sixteen-year-old cart girls. At Pine Valley or Bayonne, there’s nothing like staring down some diabetic senior citizen and his kid who’re trying to play through my Banker foursome. My eyes won’t leave theirs as I’m balancing my phone on a conference call and simultaneously sinking a forty-foot putt. “Another birdie…” I’ll announce casually. The old man and son will scurry off into the woods, embarrassed, and I hold up my phone to broadcast the applause of those on the call.

  I ask my roommate about his night, and it turns out he didn’t go out; he stayed in and “read.” Hmm. Knowing him, I figure that meant flipping through Trader Monthly in search of new Breitling ads or struggling through an abridged Harry Potter, but he has American Pastoral by Philip Roth on his bookshelf. “Literary, are we?” I ask before chucking the book across the room; not surprisingly, it lands on a blue shirt. I check out the rest of his bookshelf. It’s got the real “literature”—the collective Banker Bible.

  He has the appropriate Wall Street narratives:

  Monkey Business: Two fratty associates relate their post-MBA time at DLJ, a prestigious Investment Bank now harvested by the less prestigious Credit Suisse. I chuckle thinking about one of them pissing under a table at a Christmas party. This is the only legit I-Banking memoir ever written.

  Liar’s Poker: A nonfiction member of the Banker canon that relates the author’s years as a bond salesman in the 1980s. Although he went to Princeton, Michael Lewis is not really that Banker, having studied art history and currently living in New Orleans “writing.” Regardless, the book is epic because Lewis is aware of his personal shortcomings and focuses his efforts on the real “Big Swinging Dicks”—Lewis Ranieri, John Gutfreund, Michael Milken, et al.

  When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management: I recall bringing up this book as a favorite in several interviews. A detailed description of the clusterfuck that ensued when quant-based Long-Term Capital Management screwed up the entire economy and had to be saved by the rest of The Street, it reminds us to curse stupid math PhDs and computer science guys and anyone who trusts them with money. Originally titled Quants Suck: Get Back in the Back Office.

  There’s no Dewey Decimal System, but Jon’s reference section is grouped thematically and also well stocked. I see the basic shit every Econ major alludes to: A Random Walk Down Wall Street and Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives (the Hull book). And next to some CliffsNotes for Ulysses, he has several Vault Guid
es—they look fitting next to each other, both easy ways out for those who don’t care about really understanding anything.

  My hand runs across The Art of War and finally Atlas Shrugged, a Banking manifesto cloaked in an ostensibly philosophical novel. A tribute to society’s reliance on diligence and rational self-interest, the symbolism of finance isn’t even veiled. It’s obvious that we are Titan, and society would collapse, leaving the “looters” and “moochers” doomed if Bankers shrugged.

  There’s also a set of Trading books I haven’t read: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Market Wizards, and a few others.

  How funny is it that there’s a library in the locker room, I think, and laugh.

  But I’m curious: “Which one of these has helped you the most?” I ask Jon.

  Spitting into the Gatorade bottle he’s still drinking from, he points at The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky.

  It seems like a joke at first, but it’s not. When I sit at a table, I prefer it to be at a nightclub with a set of models as opposed to a bunch of fat dudes in Atlantic City, but the importance of poker on Wall Street is undeniable. Gambling is fairly core to our personalities. We have money, some of which must go into higher-risk investments such as gaming—it’s basic portfolio theory. Like any rational human beings, we hunt positive EV (expected value) situations and capitalize on them.