The Official Research Sales Person’s Guide to Dealing With Sales Traders
Aggravate the shit out of your sales trading counterparts whenever you have the chance.
It’s all about you and nobody else. Despite your annoying OCD, you are the smartest person at the firm. Act like it. The analysts are merely your puppets.
Anytime business is down or not up to par, there is a problem with the trading relationship. It can’t be you.
Work on your swing every chance you get. That includes during conference calls.
It’s OK to drink during the day even if there are no clients at your three hour lunch.
Learn to function in a dysfunctional world where clients constantly remind you how you need to call more but refuse to take your calls.
Find ways to develop new accounts while growing existing business 15-30% -but get used to your personal income being managed down 10-15%.
Your clients are cry-babies. Get used to it.
You provide very little one-on-ones, minimal management meetings (with companies nobody wants to hear from anyway) and day-late, dollar-short equity research.
You are a parasite living off mediocre analyst’s dime-a-dozen OK at best research calls. Be happy that nobody is hitching a free ride off your hard work.
You must only hire the hottest, sexiest cheerleader type assistants while your redheaded stepchild trading room counterparts for reasons unknown continue it’s tradition of recruiting from under the Brooklyn Bridge.
You are perfect. If it’s not the sales trader, it’s the client.
Keep everything to yourself. Never tell sales trader what ideas you are discussing with your clients or what stocks they are interested in. Sales traders like to be challenged. Nobody likes to have an edge in trading.
Never be at your desk. Ever.
If you do need to talk to a sales trader, wait till the open or 5 minutes till the close and then go stand over him. Ignore the two phones he’s holding next to his head. He’ll respect your tenacity.
Dumb it down. Remember sales traders tend to utilize only the right side of their brain so talk s-l-o-w-l-y when discussing research. They’ll never notice.
Stop by sales traders daily (two times a day if you have the time) just to see how much business they are doing for you. It’s not annoying, they love that. Why wait till the next day to see your commission run when you can irritate the shit out of them right now. “What are you doing for me?” is always such a welcome question.
It’s called a Loss Ratio. Look it up.
And when you are standing over the shoulder of a sales trader (counting your money), stop squinting at the screens like your looking for a familiar face in photo album. If your accounts are doing something – you’ll know about it. You have no idea what your staring at anyway.
It doesn’t matter if your firm follows the company or not… If the customer was buying or selling a stock, it was your idea. No matter what – it’s always your idea. We get it.
Fell free to crash trading dinners to muck up relationships that have taken years to forge.
On the off chance you happen to overhear a name the trading desk is active in while your practicing your swing, be sure to call a few sales traders to make sure they’re touching base with your clients. That’s really helpful and a good idea since we never check holders.
If you should discover a trading relationship that needs improvement or your aware of a situation that needs addressing – don’t bother going to the sales trader like a man. Instead go directly over his head to the boss. It’s the right thing to do.
It’s always fun to discuss changing sales trader coverage with account before confronting the current coverage. What information could they possibly have anyway? It’s not like a portfolio manager would ever take the easy way out and blame the trading relationship for lack of payment.
If you should decide to pull all resources or blow-up an account – don’t tell the trading desk. It’s much more fun to be blind-sided.
Never ever tell a client they haven’t paid enough commission to continue the research relationship and never ask why commissions are down year over year… Just have the sales trader do it. It’s one of their favorite things.
It’s not a full-time job. Stop pretending.
-Dopey
