Career Day

In a couple weeks I’m supposed to speak in front of my boy’s third grade class and explain what it is I do for a living. Since I don’t have any applicable skills, real world talents or actually produce anything, this might be tough. Nothing like getting dismantled by a room full of eight year olds in front of your son. For those of you not familiar with the relentlessness curiosity of an eight year old… A classroom full of them is not a force to be reckoned with.

Here’s how I see this going down:

Hi Kids-
Thanks for inviting me to career day. I’m Dylan’s daddy and I’m an equity sales trader.
Now unless you have a father who’s a sales trader that’s still employed, most of you probably don’t know what that means. Another name for a sales trader is a Wall Streeter.

Sometimes companies get so big that they need to borrow money to get bigger. I know that doesn’t sound healthy or make much sense but that’s just the way our financial system and our economy operates. When companies want to get bigger, they go see investment bankers who dress these companies up, make them look stronger than they really are and makes up stories about how much bigger they will someday grow. Then the investment bankers sell these stories to investors. Investors are people like your mommy and daddy …or… people your mommy and daddy pay to make bad decisions for them. If enough investors believe this crap, then investment banker lawyers sit down and break up the ownership of the company into thousands of little pieces called stocks. Once the company ownership is broken down into pieces, investment bankers come up with a price that’s fair and reasonable, then tack on some fucking ridiculous $5 mark up. Once the company stock price has been set it is then sold to all the interested parties. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. But those obnoxious perpetually tan investment bankers always manage to whistling their way to they bank. That’s what I should have done for a living.

Anyway, this is where I come in. A sales trader’s job is to buy and sell stocks for money managers (those are the people I mentioned earlier that your parents pay to make their decisions for them). We only deal with money managers because they are much easier to deal with than regular people. Since it’s not really their money that they are buying stocks with, they’re not afraid to play big. Now the way I make money… not lots of money, sometimes less then pennies, is by buying and selling stocks for my customers.  Truth be told  – I too don’t care if they’re making money or losing money. It doesn’t matter. They’re all good trades to me because I’m getting paid and as Dylan will tell you… Daddy likes to get paid.

What makes me special? Not much. But for one thing, I’m still employed. That means I still have my job and health care benefits.  A good question to ask me would be why do my clients continue to come to me when they have over 100 brokers just like me to choose from. The answer is simple. It’s because over the years I’ve become friends with these condescending pricks. When you start out in this business the company you work for gives you something called a corporate card. A corporate card is a small enough to fit into your wallet but it is like a magic friend making wand. With it you can buy your customers all kinds of things. You can buy them front row tickets to see Aerosmith in concert, Disney on Ice or even send them to baseball games. The corporate card is a Wall Streeter’s most important tool and best buddy. A sales trader could never survive without it. It would be like a plumber going work with out his wrench or a carpenter without a hammer. Corporate card’s magic also enable us to stay out all hours of the night while we drink overpriced cocktails, dine in New York’s best steak houses and frequent the VIP rooms of what us Wall Street professionals like to refer to as gentleman’s clubs.  It’s in return for these late nights, an occasional over-the-top gift (usually home electronics) and the willingness to take blame for all that goes wrong throughout the trading days and work weeks that my clients continue to do business with me.

Now listen kids, it may not be a glamorous job and I don’t get to ride around on the back of a fire truck like my friend Mr. Callahan over here, but listen to me, normal people dont run into fires they run away from them. And I make, or should say used to make, 10x what Mr. Callahan makes. You cant smell what I’m smelling right now, but its a foul combination of smoke and booze and that smoke smell doesnt come out easy.  Jacks daddy over there is a policeman. That’s a cool job.  Policemen are supposed to protect us from the bad guys. He gave me a ticket last spring for doing 39 in a 35. That was a $125 ticket and 3 points on my license for going 4mph over the speed limit. Look at him, he’s gotta be 50 pounds over weight and there’s no way in hell he’ll be catching any bad guys.

Anyway, thanks again for having me and before I go, I’m going to pass around a hand out with information on my summer house in the Hamptons that I want you to take home to your parents.  It’s for sale and you can tell your folks the seller is motivated. They’ll know what that means.