Quick snippets from our morning read on Monday, 01st March 2021
The new week is here and in today’s morning read, we look at the story of a banker.
Ihad to watch each episode of “Industry”, a tv drama about young bankers, in 15-minute doses. This is no fault of the show, which is joyously binge-worthy and thoroughly deserves the second series it has just been granted. It’s because it reminded me so powerfully of my previous life – as a 20-something on the trading floor – that I kept having to press pause before psyching myself up to carry on watching.
Sure, some of the details are a little off (how did Harper get away with that $140k loss? Would a hedge-fund manager really bet on Treasury yields going to 4%?). Yet most of it is jarringly familiar to anyone who, like me, was lured into a career in finance as a young person.
When a character spread his company-branded fleece on the floor of a toilet cubicle to take a nap instead of returning home to sleep, I sighed with recognition. I remembered that choice: should I waste over an hour travelling back and forth for two hours’ sleep in a real bed, or kip on the bathroom floor for three? I, too, picked the loos – mostly because I was afraid that going home would mean I would turn up late the next day.
How did I end up working in finance? Though I told people it was because I liked economics and maths, in large part it reflected my own insecurity. I reckoned I was pretty clever and reasonably numerate. But I was also worried that I lacked the wild talent and immense self-belief that you need to pursue a “dream career” in something like theatre or politics, where failure looms large. My passion was for being successful.
I found my home in an investment bank. I have always thought it curious that the public perception of those who work in finance is that they are essentially gamblers. In my experience, finance is a career for those with fierce ambition, ill-defined goals – and an aversion to risk. Working in a bank suits bright, hard-working people who can follow basic ethical rules. It is risky to follow your passion, to try to become an artist, an academic, an actor or an astronaut. It is not risky to become a banker. Show up, work hard and don’t break the law: this is all that is really required for you to become inordinately rich. Or at least rich enough to afford not to live in a house-share.
When I started my second year of university in the autumn of 2010, I fired off a slew of applications to all the top banks for internships the following summer. Almost no one is hired onto a bank’s graduate-training programme unless they have been a summer intern. Out of thousands who apply to be interns, 50 to 100 are hired at the London office of a typical investment bank.
Finance is a career for people with fierce ambition, ill-defined goals and an aversion to risk
In my interviews I trotted out the same nonsense that Harper and her soon-to-be colleagues say in theirs: “This is the purest meritocracy there is.” In banking, everything is a competition. You are constantly pitted against your peers, against rival firms. The prize is pretty irrelevant – all that matters is the winning itself.
The competition between summer interns for a full-time job is ferocious – as “Industry” shows so well. Only half the interns get offered a full-time contract at the end of the summer. Because only certain desks are hiring, you have to sniff out which ones are by meeting as many managers as possible, impressing them and shamelessly quizzing them about their openings. Rumours whip round intern chat channels: foreign-exchange sales trading is hiring, commodities trading is not, fixed-income research might be. One of the most important attributes you can have is a sharp-elbowed willingness to do whatever it takes.
Read the rest of the article here.
And as always, if you enjoyed this, check out the rest of our daily snippets, curated daily, right here on The Red Notebook.
