The Buy Side (5 page)

Stephanie tells me the firm is giving me a two-thousand-dollar bonus and then asks if I’m happy. I try to smile, but all of a sudden it’s hard for me to catch my breath. The emotion of the moment hits me all at once. Two grand is a big deal. I wag my head back and forth, trying to get the word “Thanks” out. It must look to her like I’m shrugging her off, because she says, “How about three?” so quickly
that it takes the rest of the air out of my lungs. In looking back, I’ve often thought I might have gotten ten if I choked to death. Later that same day I’m in the mail room with all of the other floaters. When we start comparing bonuses, which I later find out is a no-no, I realize I’m the only one who got the extra grand. From now on I’ll shrug at every bonus I’m ever offered.

A few months later, I get a bigger break. Stephanie wants me in her office. When I walk in, two brokers, Andy and Josh, with whom I’d floated for a couple of weeks, are already seated. Andy has a florid face and he wears thick glasses. He’s never afraid to tell you that he comes from money:

“Hey, Andy, how was the Knicks game last night?”

“Oh, it was good. On my way to the Garden before tip-off I had my driver stop by my apartment on Park Avenue to pick up my floor seats,” he might say.

Josh is olive-skinned and wears similar glasses. He’s almost too nice for Wall Street. Andy takes advantage of Josh’s gentle demeanor. But together, they’re the golden boys of the firm. They get the hottest leads, the best allocations, and all the resources they need. “We’d like to offer Turney a position with our team,” Andy tells Stephanie.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, high-net-worth departments, like Morgan Stanley’s Private Client Services, underwent a seminal shift in their approach. It used to be that these brokers primarily helped their clients trade. Brokers were instructed to generate revenue by commission trades. The new model is to gather “assets under management,” using the heft of $10, $20, even $100 million parcels in investments and charge a fee to manage the money. Although individual client trading still makes up a fair percentage of the business, assets under management is where the big money lies. Andy and Josh want to focus on pounding the pavement and raising more capital to collect their
management fees. But they still need someone to be in the office trading for clients. Actually, it’s more Andy’s offer. He’s the alpha dog of the team, a guy’s guy, and in me he sees a potential protégé. When he tells me they want me for the position, my pulse races. I think back to my first interview and the trading floor at Lehman Brothers. Although it won’t be nearly the same, I
will
be trading.

But maybe more important to me is that the permanent position comes with a raise. Fifty thousand. Twice what I was making as a floater. This is life-changing money. No longer will I need to borrow money from Jayme every other Thursday to buy a subway token to get to work. Maybe I’ll even start taking a cab. What a luxury! Sleeping in an extra twenty minutes, never worrying about a service shutdown, not standing all the way to work, no one stepping on my feet. Maybe I’ll buy a new suit at Brooks Brothers over the weekend. And on Monday I’ll be holding a Dr Pepper and a
Wall Street Journal
I pick up at the newsstand. I’ll tell the cabbie the address of my office and sit back and enjoy the ride. I feel like I have a career.

My desk—I can call it that now—is next to Andy’s. All of the desks are clustered together, including those that belong to Gail and Michelle, the other two assistants. A mother of two, Gail has poofy brown hair and rosy cheeks and knows the ropes—and all the gossip. She’s been with the firm for years. Michelle is my age and hot (though she goes out of her way, with frumpy outfits and thick glasses, to hide it). She’s also frighteningly smart and the most detailed-oriented person I’ve ever met. I’m sure I’ll get along with both of them. Josh and Andy seem excited to have me on their team and couldn’t be nicer. Then the opening bell rings.

Andy starts reeling off numbers to me: “ITG, I bought fifty at a half, twenty-five at five-eighths, and twenty-five at three-quarters. I
need my average,” he says. I don’t even have a pen in my hand. What? He can tell I’m struggling, so he says it again but only faster. Michelle, who watches the scene unfold out of the corner of her eye, starts jotting something down on a piece of paper. I’m still trying to remember what Andy said when Michelle hands me the note. It reads: “50k at a half, 25k at 5/8 and 25k at 3/4” in perfect penmanship. I’m still not sure what to do with it. I start to multiply 50k times .50 and then I multiply 25k times .75, but I’m not sure what five-eighths is. I start to divide eight by five to figure out what the decimal is. Andy yells over, “I need my average now.” Michelle hands me another note with the answer on it while I’m still doing long division.

That night at home I wonder what it would be like to go back to Kennebunk and put my application in for a job as the high school football coach. It’s not a pretty thought, but it’s safe. I’m not about to quit, though. I’ve never quit anything in my life. Or at least at anything I wanted to do. Maybe it’s the thought of going back to Kennebunk High that gives me the idea. I make a cheat sheet of the fractions and decimal points, which I plan to tape into my desk drawer at work in the morning. It’s funny. In school, I thought fractions were meaningless, and here they’re the most important thing in my life. If I’d known I was going to be in this position I’d have paid more attention in math.

It takes time, but each day I get a little better, and in six months I’m able to spit an average out to Josh and Andy without looking at my cheat sheet. I’m as fast at my job as any of the assistants—well, maybe not Michelle.

By 1995, in my second year at Morgan Stanley, the biggest change in doing business has occurred. The Internet is now on everyone’s computer, and it brings with it both opportunity and fear. The world
around us begins to speed up; trades that used to take five days are settled in three. The upside is that the advent of technology and email levels the playing field for someone like me, and maybe even gives me an advantage.

Now I type emails to fix problems. Maybe having my fingers on the keyboard awakens my dormant writer’s imagination, but having a way with words can come in handy. For example, there’s something called a “cancel and correct” form, which we use when we have to fix an error on a trade. If you have to rebook more than three trades a month, the back office, the operations guys, will charge fifty bucks for each subsequent ticket. Andy and Josh get upset with me every month we get charged, because it’s my fault. One day, when I’m emailing a fourth cancel and correct form, I put “Personal Ads” in the subject line. Then I type, “Single White Male sales assistant with an athletic build looking for an operations guy who can help me with my cancel and correct. Must also enjoy gourmet cooking, movies, and long walks on the beach.” The response from the back office comes immediately. They don’t charge us for the cancel and correct. Right then, I begin to realize that social skills might be as important on Wall Street as an Ivy League MBA.

Though things get better in PCS, three years somehow pass and still there’s no sign of a job on the trading floor. I go over to the floor once or twice a month, just to say hello and hang around a bit. I want them to know who I am. That way, if a job opens up maybe they’ll think of me. I want to be around the Uncle Tuckers of the Wall Street world; I don’t want to become like Andy. The trading floor isn’t stiff like PCS. It’s glamorous, flashy, filled with young guys my age. Though I do
some
trading, most of the work I do is administrative. I decide to ask Stephanie for help.

When I lightly rap on her office door, the door I’m already standing
inside of, she greets me with a terse “What?” Stephanie is, as usual, wearing a black suit. If she ever had to go to a last-minute funeral, she’d be all set. She tries to smile but seems annoyed that I’m in her office.

“I just wanted to check in with you. I’m into my third year and I always thought the plan was for me to get a job on the trading floor.” She stands up and moves by me to close her door.

“It’s not my job to find you a new job,” she says. I feel a rush of blood to my face. “If you don’t want to be here I have hundreds of résumés to choose from to hire someone else.”

“I’m grateful for my job,” I say. “I’m sorry. Just …”

“Just what?” she asks. “Just wave my magic wand and create a million-dollar trading job for you? Do it on your own.” I need to do damage control. I tell her I understand. “You have to make a difference,” she says, calming down just a little bit. “Opportunities aren’t given, they’re made.” Though her statement sounds like something stitched on a pillow, she seems very proud of it. I sense an opportunity for a semi-dignified exit. I have to show her I’m a team player—she likes toughness.

“You’re right,” I say. “Thank you for the words of encouragement.”

I get up to leave her office and open the door. “Would you like me to leave this open or close it?” I ask.

“Leave it open,” she says.

I’m a few steps outside her office when she says, “Go make friends with Matt DeSalvo or David Slaine. Buy them a drink.” She follows this with a cackle. “That’ll show ’em.”

The idea of chumming around with DeSalvo or Slaine hadn’t entered my mind. As managing directors on the trading desk, they exist at a level far above the social circles with which I’m familiar.

I’M SURROUNDED
by women. The bar Cite is across the street from our office and is a favorite. I’ve only recently begun going out after work with my peers. I’m not really all that comfortable with the suit-and-tie Wall Street hangouts. Give me a pair of jeans and a sawdust floor any day. Cite is primarily a restaurant, and, I must admit, with the curved bar and intimate space, the place has its merits. The wineglasses are gigantic and bartenders pour heavy. On a typical night at Cite, pronounced “sit-tay,” as in “par-tay,” there are ten to fifteen women from our floor at the bar and five to ten men from the trading floor. The spot isn’t a secret. Many a six-hour love story has started here.

I’m standing at the bar next to Drea and Keryn. They both run the syndicate desk on our floor. Drea is short for Andrea. She has piercing blue eyes and a tiny gap between her front teeth, which on her is very sexy. She’s almost as naïve as I am. She sees the good in everyone. I love hanging out with her. We giggle all the time. Her assistant is Keryn, whose eyes are even bluer than Drea’s. She has a deep tan and jet black hair. Guys are drawn to her like mosquitoes to a bug zapper. And on this night her voltage is on high.

Just down the crowded bar a few stools sits Dave Slaine. Everyone on Wall Street knows him. Six feet tall and muscle-bound, Slaine has the body of a professional football player. But his wispy brown hair gives him an almost boyish appearance. Don’t be fooled. His hair-trigger temper is legendary on the floor. He’s the head of the over-the-counter desk; he runs the entire trading operation. When he’s angry, which seems like most of the time, he talks to people in grunts. If a trade doesn’t go his way, you can practically see the steam come out
of his ears. There’s a story often told about Slaine that has several versions. Whether it was that he was eating french fries and someone kept bothering him for them, or that someone wouldn’t give him any of the fries they were eating, or that he just got mad at the computer terminal really doesn’t matter. All of the versions end in the same way, with him ripping the keyboard out of the computer and flinging it across the room. Dave scares me. He scares just about everybody. But when Keryn calls him over, I remember Stephanie’s stitched-pillow suggestion.

Slaine buzzes over to Keryn. When she introduces me, he does a kind of a sideways nod in my direction without taking his eyes off her. I’ve met him before, not that he’d remember. I sit on my stool waiting for my chance to make a comment or add to the conversation. I know I have to do something, or say something. I chug my drink.

Down the bar, I see my coworkers Heather and Nora, both of whom are just as attractive as Drea and Keryn. Heather is the blond rebel cheerleader type—anything goes. Nora has the Latin-infused exotic look. I wave them over. One of the advantages of growing up with older sisters is that I know how to connect with females. It just comes naturally. I know just about every woman who works in PCS. I know where they grew up, their boyfriend’s name (if they have one), and how to make them smile. That they all happen to be beautiful says more about Wall Street’s hiring practices than any selectiveness on my part.

“This is Dave,” I say to Heather and Nora. And just like that, Dave and I are surrounded by some of the most beautiful women in the bar.

“You guys need a drink?” I ask. I can feel the group’s attention on me. Even Dave has begun to realize I’m standing next to him. “Heather wants a boob job,” I say. “Dave, what do ya think?” Heather playfully slaps me on the shoulder, then sticks out her friendly B-cups
with a smile. Dave has one of those slack-jaw, I-can’t-believe-this-guy-just-said-that expressions. But his eyes are wide and twinkling. I can feel my stock rise. I chug more.

“They look great to me,” he says.

Heather chimes right in. “I’m thinking D-cups,” she says, holding out what they might look like with her two hands. Everyone laughs. I try to get Drea and Nora to stick out their chests, but they’re not having it. I order a round of drinks and call over a couple of other girls from our floor, Angelia, Liz, and then Lauren, an almost six-foot-tall beautiful girl from Texas. I’ve worked with them for almost three years. It’s somewhere around this point that I realize I’m in my element. I feel in total control and at ease. Only in looking back can I see how seminal this moment is. I would never be able to stand out at my job. There I’m out-experienced, out-connected, and out-degreed. But here, with a glass in hand, I have as good a chance as any to move and shake. Maybe even a better chance than most. When someone suggests we hit another bar, I pipe right up.

“Then grab your coats,” I say.