The first two years you’re just happy to be working on Wall Street making more money than you ever expected and say things like “Please God – Just give me one good year, that’s all I need”. By year five you start to think you are God, you’ve doubled your income but find yourself getting annoyed because some of the d-bags around you make more money.
In years five through ten you start losing sight of who you really are, your dreams and what’s important. You stopped keeping up with the Jones’s and started keeping up with Winfrey’s. You forget the relevance of living below your means.
After 10 years on the street you’ve made enough money (not necessarily saved enough) to lose touch with the real world and believe that what you do really means something, that your skill set is actually worth six – maybe even seven figures. Second homes, fancy cars, extravagant vacations, six-figure country club memberships, private school for the kids – it’s a no brainer… Even if things get tight for a few months there’s always next years bonus.
You’re home is nicer than most people you grew up with, your wife doesn’t work (like most of her friends do) and since you’re now “smarter” then your parents – you stopped taking their advice. You must be smarter – right? I mean… your house is bigger, you make more money than they ever did and you’ve got a summer home in the Hamptons.
Regular people are beneath you. They start their mornings with street cart coffee and not Starbucks. They don’t play golf on the weekends – instead they cut their own lawns and wash their own cars. They don’t have live-in nannies – they themselves help their children with their homework and teach them right from wrong. The don’t have their BMW service manager’s phone number programmed into their iPhone’s and Blackberry’s – instead they use six-year-old Motorola Flip phones (that still works just fine) to call Walmart and find out when the big spring sale starts… And when they get to the store, they’ll stand on-line for 40 minutes to get a rain check voucher for the 15% savings on the $35 sold-out fertilizer spreader.
You’ve even upgraded your friends. OK so they’re not really friends, they’re kind of shallow and if push ever came to shove, they wouldn’t necessarily have your back – but at least with your new Wall Street buddies you don’t have to be conscience about driving your new Benz, play down your country club memberships or be ashamed about the new media room you just put in while your brother-in-law hasn’t been able to find a job in nine months.
For those of you currently in the 15-20 period of your career – this is for you. First of all you’re a dinosaur like me. You’ve got more street friends out work than you do with jobs, you’re thinking about how much money you’ve wasted over the years and what better financial shape you’d be in if you didn’t invest in that bar or drop that seed money into the You Can’tLose.com start up back in 1999. You’ve accepted the fact that your biggest pay days are behind you, it’s all about maintaining lifestyle, putting kids through school and you’re not really sure what happened to your original plan of ‘ten years and out’.
You’re trying to get accustomed to both client and personal spending limits. You stopped embracing technology and started seeing it as a candy coated poison pill. Technology is a bitch – it was great when it gave us the edge, but in race to trade for less we fucked ourselves. “Hey guys look at this – it’s a program that trades even better than I do and costs less!” … “What do you mean you’re letting me go?”
Anyway, if your one of those still working than pat your self on the back and there does appear to be light at the end of tunnel… 1/8’s and 1/4’s aren’t coming back anytime soon and people aren’t broker-hopping for seven-figure two-year deals like back in the day, but after an across the industry board of mass-execution layoffs and financial market havoc, it appears that the institutional equity business as a whole is trying to stabilize. Since there’s still plenty of fat in some of the bigger shops, we’re still seeing some layoffs – however, new shops are beginning to spring up, others are reshuffling, commissions have bottomed and best of all – we now have eye-opening Amanda Drury revealing just enough scoop to keep us smiling. Thank you CNBC.
Take it and bid it,
Dopey
