Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly. – Batman costume label.
…We reasoned that many careers have a painful right of passage attached to them. …years of initial grunt work. …mindless paper processors.
…a large part of any investment bank’s success becomes a function of how many bodies it can throw at a given piece of business or, even more important, at a potential piece of business.
I gave the same shameless pitch to each and every bank. The pitch went something like this:
“I was an analyst at Kidder and I know I’ll have to work long hours, but I ready, willing, and able. I’ll be able to hit the ground running and your firm is the one that I really want to work for. You guys have a great reputation and I would be honoured to be part of your team. I’m eager, able and ready to work for you. I know the reputations of the firms because I worked on Wall Street before and I know your firm is a good for me. I liked what I did as an analyst and I really want to go back into investment banking as an associate for a premier firm like yours.”
… I had to bite my tongue at times. However, this was the epitome of the bullshitter bullshitting another bullshitter, and it usually worked.
… It was uncanny what a twenty-four hour day, seven day a week non-stop-stress career choice would do to our judgement.
… Finally, there are the analysts. Monkeys. Tons and tons of monkeys. Not humans, just monkeys crawling all over each other and pulling lice out of each other’s fur. Those are the analysts.
… Being assigned to create a pitch book is a punishment. It’s the pinnacle of mindless processing. Associates start out believing that they are going to create the Magna Carta, the masterpiece that will bring in the deal, and that their pitch book will move mountains, convert heavens, and generate enormous fees. They end up realizing that the pitch book is an unholy creation, a mixture of three-week old potted meat and smelly cottage cheese with just enough curry powder to cover the latent rottenness.
… A pitch book is never original. It’s three sections from five other pitch books mashed together with a new overview infront. The general outline is always the same. There are four main sections: Overview, Capital Markets Update, Valuation, and Expertise.
… Over and over again associates tweak their DCF models. Over and over again they have models that show the company growing at a rate that, if continued, would allow the company to be modelled to take over the entire planet within a generation. Over and over again the investors buy securities based on inflated and unrealistic expectations. For some reason, nobody ever learns. Its part of the magic of DCF.
… It was the last straw. There was no more fire in my belly. There was no more spark in my eye. I had to get out.
… Slick laughed. “Don’t fool yourself, man. It was like taking a teaspoon of sand of the beaches in Rio. Nobody missed a beat. We’re all commodities. Completely replaceable.”
… So we learned to climb, and then to swing on the vines in order to grab the fruit. We swung from vine to vine, all day and all night, and filled our arms with the tasty morsels. At first we had a good time swinging around, but eventually we began to feel like we were moving around in circles. Ever day we saw the same vines and the same trees. Every day we had the same dung beetles crawling up our legs and the same annoying baboons swinging behind us barking order. Ultimately, we realised that while we had an armful of fruit we had no time to eat it and nothing much else. The more we swung, the more the jungle seemed to expand. Our arms were tired.
… And so, we decided to get out. We cut down a rubber tree and made ourselves a dugout canoe. We made some paddles of warthog horns. We navigated our canoe down the river and out of the jungle. We broke free.
Miss it? Like a cannibal misses a side order of vegetables.
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