The Buy Side Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the wrong bus. Bars stay open until four a.m. Twenty-Third Street is not downtown.
    It takes some time, but by December 1994, things finally start to break my way. First, Stephanie calls me into the conference room. I’m not in trouble, but I still have anxiety. Everybody has anxiety around bonus time. Whether you’re in a white shoe firm or a here-today-gone-tomorrow mutual fund, the same scene is replayed countless times on the Street. Your name is called and everybody in the office watches as you march to hear your fate. The walk is like a cross between a bride heading down the aisle and an overmatched challenger heading into the ring—expectation and fear course through your bloodstream. In an otherwise empty conference room, your boss or bosses sit stone-faced. They’ve worn their best bonus-day outfits, ones that are always somber and conservative. Though it’s Christmastime—I mean holiday time—they pretend there’s nothing festive in what’s about to happen.
    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 quicklythat 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 theirmanagement 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