Go Ask Alice

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that Mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall

— Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit”

“Life’s a box of chocolates, Forrest. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

— Forrest Gump

Well, Children, it’s silly season again. Yes, that’s right: Twitter just filed an initial registration statement (or S-1) for its long-awaited initial public offering. Confidentially.¹ And commemorated it with a tweet on its own social media platform, of course:

We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.
— Twitter (@twitter) September 12, 2013

Tools.

* * *This of course means every numbnuts and his dog are currently crawling out of the woodwork and regaling us with their carefully considered twaffle about what Twitter is doing, what it should do, and how much money we’re all going to make buying and selling Twitter’s IPO shares when and if they ever come to market. A particularly amusing sub-genre of said twaffle consists of various pundits of varying credibility and credulousness pontificating on what Twitter is actually worth, as if that is a concrete piece of information embedded in the wave function of quantum mechanics or the cosmic background radiation, rather than a market consensus which does not exist yet because, well, there is no public market for Twitter’s shares.²

But there seems to be something about IPOs that renders even the most gimlet-eyed, levelheaded market observers (like Joe Nocera, John Hempton, and... well, just those two) a little goofy and soft in the head. Perhaps they just can’t understand why such an obvious and persistent arbitrage anomaly as the standard 10 to 15% IPO discount on newly public shares—which everybody seems to know about even though they can’t explain it—persists as it does. Or why, given how many simoleons the evil Svengalis of Wall Street get paid to underwrite IPOs, there are so many offerings that end up trading substantially higher (e.g., LinkedIn) or substantially lower (e.g., Facebook) than the offer price they set once shares are released for trading.

So, out of the bottomless goodness of my heart—and a heartfelt wish to nip some of the more ludicrous twitterpating I expect from the assembled financial media and punditry in the bud—I will share here in clear and simple terms some of the explanations I have offered in the past.

* * *

First, the famous IPO discount.

I have written:

Now there is a longstanding tradition, rule of thumb, heuristic—whatever you want to call it—in IPO underwriting that issuers should sell their shares in an IPO at a discount to intrinsic or fair value. In normal, healthy markets, this discount is normally discussed in a range of 10 to 15%. ... The intended purpose of the IPO discount is twofold: 1) to help place the relatively large bolus of shares which an IPO represents with investors who have alternate potential uses for their money and 2) to bolster positive demand in the marketplace for follow-on buying. You see, an issuer of an IPO is not, unlike a company which is selling 100% of itself, trying to maximize total proceeds for existing shareholders (and fuck the newcomers). It is trying to attract a new set of shareholders who will be co-owners of the company for at least some non-trivial period of time. An IPO issuer only sells a minority of the total ownership position in the firm, and it wants to develop a positive, receptive marketplace for future stock sales in the public markets.

Now this is a critical point, so I’d like you to focus on it carefully. In virtually no instance I am aware of do the existing (pre-public) shareholders sell a majority of either i) the firm’s newly created, “primary” shares or ii) their own already existing, “secondary” shares in a IPO. For one thing the underwriters would strongly discourage it. Why? Because it looks bad. Here you have this brand new, shiny, exciting, expensive company coming to market, and the people who know it best, the insiders, want to sell out big time? Danger, Will Robinson! Institutional investors aren’t (usually) that stupid, for one thing, and for another we Wall Street underwriters typically have to deal with our clients on the buy side of the house much more frequently and for a longer time than our intermittent issuers on the sell side. We have no interest in intentionally selling Fidelity, Vanguard, or anybody else a lemon IPO, no matter how much Sleazebag LLC wants to pay us in underwriting spread. We are middlemen, remember? We have a reputation to uphold, believe it or not.

So in normal circumstances Wall Street banks encourage issuers to make primary company shares, which raise money directly for the company, the entirety or vast majority of its initial offering. That way, new investors feel they are coming into the ownership structure as relatively equal co-owners of the firm alongside existing insiders.³ If demand is strong enough, we can often slip a relatively minor slug of insiders’ secondary shares into the IPO also, usually in the form of the underwriters’ 15% overallotment option, or “green shoe.” In some instances, the company may not need any primary proceeds, and the IPO is actually done as a precursor to selling insider shareholdings over time (as, for example, in the case of a firm owned by a private equity investor). But even in such cases, investors are much happier to see the company raise primary proceeds by issuing new shares, even if the principal use of proceeds is to repay a loan taken out to fund a pre-IPO dividend to the inside shareholders. In any event, nobody—underwriters or new investors alike—likes to see senior company executives or large, controlling inside shareholders sell down much more than a modest percentage of their remaining holdings on the IPO itself. IPO investors want to see the rats invested in the ship they’re buying passage on, too.

And the reason for the discount itself is simple, as I stated before. You are selling a large slug (often hundreds of millions or billions of dollars) of a brand new, unproven investment to new investors all at once. Like most new product introductions, it should not be that surprising to see sellers offer an initial discount off the expected sale price to incentivize buyers to try their unproven product. And, as I hope I have explained to you above, the owners of newly public companies are trying to establish a receptive market for future share sales, whether primary or secondary. Surely a little dilution (eighty-five cents on the dollar for primary proceeds or a minor portion of your existing secondary shares) is a small price to pay to establish a healthy public market for your future fund raising activity, no? And the discount is not pocketed cost-free by investors, either. Underwriters make sustained efforts to allocate discounted IPO shares to investors who indicate strong demand to buy more in the aftermarket, and who promise to do so. And we do keep track, and punish backsliders and reward those true to their word in future, unrelated IPOs and security offerings. This is one of the core reasons to employ underwriters in the first place, no matter how sophisticated an issuer may be: we play a long game with the buy side, and we have the opportunity to enforce behavior helpful to our issuers by the way we play it. Intermittent issuers simply don’t have this kind of market power.⁴

* * *

Of course, all this focus on the IPO discount might give the naive observer a comforting sense of precision and predictability about the post-offering performance of the shares. But this is unwarranted. When I wrote that underwriters suggest a 10 to 15% discount to the “intrinsic or fair value” of IPO shares, the alert among you should have immediately cried, “Bullshit!”

And you would be right. We are guessing:

Before they ever approach the market, investment banks do a lot of work evaluating new issuers to come up with a price which they think the company will be worth once it is trading normally in the marketplace. They do this based not only on the company’s own historical and projected financial results but also on the trading multiples and profiles of comparable companies already public. ... Now, you can see that this exercise is an art, not a science. Investment bank IPO pricing is the epitome of (very) highly educated guessing. We often get it wrong, but, on average, IPO pricing is normally pretty accurate. After all, it’s our job, and we do it well. The picture gets complicated, however, when the company in question, like LinkedIn, does not have any comparable peers among listed public companies. Our guesses become much less educated and much more finger-in-the-air type things. There is no cure for this but to go to market and see what investors themselves tell you they are willing to pay.

You see, investment banks try to guess what the market will pay for a stock. But, to be completely honest, we have no idea.

... once we go to market, the issuer and the investment banks essentially hand the steering wheel over to investors. We pitch, and wheedle, and cajole, and praise the company to the skies, but it is investors who set the price, initially in individual conversations with the underwriters’ salespeople—where they indicate the number of shares, if any, they want to get in the offering and any price sensitivities or limits they may have—next when the banks set the final price for the offering, and finally—and, by definition, definitively—when they bid up the price in the aftermarket after the shares are released for trading.

Let me make this perfectly clear: Investment banks do not set the ultimate price for IPOs; the market does.

And sometimes, as in the case at hand, you get what we call in the trade a “hot IPO.” Investors work themselves into a buying frenzy, the offering becomes massively oversubscribed (e.g., orders for 10 or more shares for every one being offered), and the valuation gets out of control. Underwriters have a limited ability to respond to these conditions, which typically emerge during the pre-IPO marketing or “bookbuilding” process, including revising estimated pricing up, like LinkedIn’s banks did (+30%), and increasing the number of shares offered. But eventually you just have to release the issue into the marketplace and let the market decide what the company is really worth.

Investment bankers are not idiots. We have tons of experience and expertise to bring to bear on valuation, and we are in constant contact with institutional investors on the buy side to gauge market demand. We work with the issuer’s financial and operating metrics (like the ones nobody has seen for Twitter) and the market trading multiples of comparable companies, which are similar social media darlings, to derive a normalized trading value for the firm. But we cannot say whether the market, in its infinite, obscure, unexplained wisdom, will agree with us or not.

And it is the market which decides:

Re Twitter's IPO: you need to understand that a good firm, a profitable firm, and an attractive stock investment can be 3 unrelated things.
— Epicurean Dealmaker (@EpicureanDeal) September 13, 2013

Don’t like that? Have some cake.

Related reading on IPOs:
Jane, You Ignorant Slut (May 21, 2011) – The LinkedIn IPO kerfuffle, part 1
Dan, You Pompous Ass (May 22, 2011) – The LinkedIn IPO kerfuffle, part deux
Size Matters (March 21, 2012) – The JOBS Act and why we see fewer IPOs nowadays
As Long as the Right People Get Shot (May 30, 2012) – No, John Hempton (inter alia), underwriters do not have a moral or fiduciary obligation to get the sellers of an IPO the highest price


¹ Which novel-ish practice is allowed under the JOBS Act for what the SEC characterizes as “Emerging Growth Companies,” or tender little start-ups with less than $1 billion in sales. The JOBS Act, by the way, has done virtually nothing to create jobs. Sic transit the Legislative Branch.
² Yes, yes, I know there is some sleazeball outfit selling participation units backed by previously sold Twitter employee shares (all other shares being prohibited from trading in advance of the IPO). But if you think you can establish the post-IPO trading value of the company based on illiquid trading in such a derivative gray market, I encourage you to meet me next Tuesday at the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. I will then and there be delighted to sell you the deed (or rather a deed to the Deed) to this magnificent cultural artifact for the bargain price of $200 million in cash. Small, unmarked bills, please.
³ Yes, I also know there is a disturbing tendency, particularly among hot technology issuers, to sell IPO investors second-rate stock which does not carry the same voting rights as insiders’ shares. This is a reprehensible tactic which guts the potentially important corporate governance function fully voting shares convey, but it is a bull market phenomenon many issuers love to take advantage of if they can. For what it is worth, most underwriters don’t like it, but we hold our noses all the way to market. Hey, nobody made you buy Google or Facebook shares, did they, bub?
⁴ This is why caviling by several of my previous interlocutors about the unseemliness of Wall Street dispensing favors to the buy side on IPOs is both shortsighted and dense. It is because we dispense favors, and try to make our buy side customers happy too, that we have the power to twist their arms when we need to, and attract their attention to those issuers which do not have every newspaper in Christendom bloviating about their offering plans. Middlemen, duh.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

You’ll Rise as Smoke to the Sky

In memoriam, September 11, 2001:

• A Grave in the Clouds

• The Burning Ones

• A Good Death

Twelve years is a long time. And no time at all.

Salaam. Shalom. Peace be with you.


© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

I, Fembot

“I think personality is much more important than intelligence, don’t you?”

— Bicentennial Man

I confess freely to you, O Dearest and Most Patient of Understanding Readers, that I have read Margo Epprecht’s Quartz piece “The real reason women are leaving Wall Street” front to back at least three times, and I still cannot discover a coherent answer therein to the article’s title. It is well enough written, with plenty of quotes from concerned characters and an adequate admixture of data and trend analysis to illustrate its principal empirical point: that notwithstanding a constant flow of women entering the industry over the past several decades and achieving some measure of success, it does not seem that many (enough?) stay. Nevertheless, I do not think it is confessing my own lack of sympathy or attention to assert that one searching for reasons for such a situation or even the author’s conclusions in this regard might remain just as nonplussed as I am.

There are allusions to Wall Street’s “hierarchical world” and “a specific culture of men” (whatever the hell that psychological gem, unelaborated and unexplained in the text, is supposed to mean). Ms Epprecht also points to the apotheosis of risk-taking over the past two decades, which, given the accompanying assertion that women shun risk more than their testosterone-addled colleagues, I suppose is intended to be dispositive. Anecdotes are offered of successful women on Wall Street who achieved high rank, power, and good industry reputation only to find, in vague ways left undescribed, that their achievement felt hollow, and the industry just didn’t offer the rewards they were looking for in exchange for their hard work and sacrifice.

Now, Mrs. Dealmaker Mère didn’t raise no fools. Having spent enough decades on this planet to be much closer than many of you to my AARP card, I am well aware that trying to determine what that mythopoetic, monolithic assemblage entitled “Women” wants is not only a mug’s game, guaranteed to relegate one to sleeping in a real or metaphorical doghouse for a week, but also empirically and epistemologically unsound. There is a huge range of capacity, preference, and personality among women—just as there is among men—and even without the personal examples known to me of women who are tougher, more aggressive, and bigger risk takers than the vast majority of men ever could be, I am certain there are more than enough women who would not only thrive but enjoy Wall Street culture without a second thought. By the same token, there must be plenty of smart, driven, and ambitious women who would look under the festering rock that is my industry and dismiss it completely with a judicious and decisive “Eww.” Frankly, the examples Ms Epprecht cites in her article support my prior point. The women she mentions are no cupcakes.

And investment banking is not a giant industry. Surely there are enough ambitious, tough-as-nails women who like money and social prestige sprinkled among the fairer sex to populate the cubicles and corner offices of Wall Street. Women who are not averse to sacrificing family, friends, and relationships—and the bulk of their normal childbearing years¹—for the brass ring at Goldman or Morgan Stanley. Or maybe not. Maybe Wall Street gets all the women who can and want to fit into this culture already. Maybe the suitable portion of the distaff distribution just isn’t that big. Maybe smart, ambitious women have more real or perceived choices than men do, and they realize that investment banking is a tough, uncompromising way to spend your youth and health in exchange for a promise you will make it to the top which is just too uncertain. There is a perspective on my industry that, far from being Elysium, it is actually a pernicious and deadly trap which draws its victims in with unsupportable visions of endless riches and power only to chain them to a gold-plated galley oar. A devotee of this perspective might therefore look upon the relative dearth of women in investment banking and declare, “You go, girl. Smart move.” Perhaps the shortage of women on Wall Street is a good thing, and a marker of their superior judgment and perception.

I will let you decide. Given that this is a discussion about women and Wall Street, I suspect you already have a firmly held opinion.

* * *

Be that as it may, however, I would like to share a couple tidbits of advice inspired by Ms Epprecht’s article for any sharp-toothed woman currently plotting her way to the top of the Wall Street heap.

First, a perceptive reader will notice that many of Ms Epprecht’s examples—including herself, naturally—are of women who made their names and careers on the research side of investment banks. This is true even of the Poster Girl for Women on Wall Street, Sallie Krawcheck, who many fail to remember made her name as a highly respected bank analyst at Sanford Bernstein before Sandy Weill poached her to run Citigroup’s Smith Barney unit after Elliot Spitzer blew up Wall Street’s long-running game of using research analysts to promote clients’ stocks and new underwriting. This is particularly ironic, because the big boom in Wall Street sell-side equity research in the 1980s and 1990s which Ms Epprecht cites as a trend supporting the influx of women was driven by banks’ relentless promotion of equities to retail and institutional investors. The Eighties and Nineties were the zenith of Equity Research on the Street: analysts were never held in higher regard nor better paid than when they were used as the sharp end of the spear for distributing stocks. Analysts like Jack Grubman and Mary Meeker were rock stars, paid just like the investment bankers they helped to win underwriting assignments, and even better known.

But this, as you know, struck many in retrospect (like Mr. Spitzer) as an unacceptable conflict of interest, and the settlement he forced on Wall Street demoted research analysts from front line revenue producers back to the second class citizens they used to be. Once investment banks could no longer use nor pay analysts for winning lucrative business, they stopped paying and promoting them like investment bankers, and their numbers, pay, and prominence dwindled. Add the rise of hedge funds (who tend to disregard sell-side research completely) in the Aughts as Wall Street’s biggest and most lucrative trading partners—displacing large institutional investors like pension funds and mutual fund complexes—and the retreat of individual investors from meaningful participation in the equity market, and equity research departments transformed from profit centers and sales arms back into cost centers. And if there is one place in a sales- and profit-driven institution like an investment bank where the Board and Executive Committee do not look for senior executives, it is in staff divisions and cost centers.² Sallie Krawcheck, ironically enough, made the leap to senior executive management just as (and largely because) the career platform she had risen to prominence on collapsed beneath her.

The rise and fall of female-friendly research departments as profit centers alone might explain the relative paucity of women among top executive ranks in investment banking. This plus the empirical tendency of women in finance to be attracted to other staff departments like legal, compliance, human resources, and information technology, like Ms Epprecht’s other example. Your chances of making it to the executive suite, except as the CFO (the ultimate staff position, held by Krawcheck and Lehman’s Erin Callan, for example) or head of one of the ”softer,” more boring divisions like retail banking or asset management, are materially hurt by building a career in one of your firm’s cost centers rather than a line position in a profit center. Is this fair? Does it make sense? I don’t know, but I guarantee you it is not limited to investment banking.

If you want to make it to the executive suite, don’t try to make yourself “useful” to your firm. Find somewhere where you can make a lot of money.

* * *

Second, the historical success of women in research in the 1980s and 1990s illustrates another point which I feel it is incumbent on me to make here. I will illustrate it with an example provided by Alison Deans (asset management):

As a manager, Deans noticed that one of her best female employees rarely sought her out. The men who reported to her often stopped in to ask about her weekend or to tell stories about business successes. The female employee didn’t take the time to nurture her relationship with her boss. “I realized that I was spending very little time with one of my most effective employees,” relates Deans. “She was so busy getting work done that the only time I saw her was when something got in her way. I started thinking like a male manager: ‘These women are always running in here with their hair on fire and the guys are all good guys.’”

This, in my experience, is all too often how women in my business mishandle the socialization aspect of the job. Ms Deans chose to make a special effort to engage her employee, and the article draws the conclusion that such organizational cultures must be changed to become more inclusive. But let me be blunt: expecting your firm to do this for you is stupid.

If you want to succeed and grow in any business, you have to manage up and sideways as well as down. Doing a great job is simply not enough. Part of succeeding in an organization involves establishing trust, and you cannot do that if you are 100% focused on just doing your job. Ms Deans’ employee was an idiot not to try to engage with her boss on a social level. Call this politics if you will, it is a critical element of career management in any organization: making friends and allies and cultivating networks of friendship, support, and acquaintance. The networking aspect is particularly critical in my business, where building and growing internal and external networks is practically the definition of the job. Research analysts, if they are any good, tend to be good at cultivating external networks among investors and clients, but the job itself—especially now given the new, hermetically isolated regulatory environment—discourages the development of internal networks. Just read Ms Epprecht’s admiring description of Maryann Keller’s workday: it is almost all externally directed.

In fact, equity research is particularly susceptible of supporting the tendency of many women who come to finance to focus on their jobs to the detriment of their careers. Schmoozing, shooting the shit, going to Chipotle with your group for lunch, discussing movies or TV shows or sporting events in the office at 3:00 am while you wait for Presentation Resources to turn that massive underwriting pitch are all indispensable parts of your job, if you want to make it anything but a short-term stint on the way to another industry. Women are not alone in making the mistake of ignoring these career management rules, but in my limited anecdotal experience a much higher percentage of female than male investment bankers tend to be highly intelligent, hyper-serious, relentlessly efficient robots. Perhaps they feel it necessary to behave this way in order to be taken seriously, I don’t know. In many respects they are better potential bankers than the middling-intelligent frat boys, lacrosse players, and oarsmen we seem to default to hiring. But those men often have far better political savvy, and they are naturals at swimming in the high pressure team environment that my business depends on. Nobody wants to work with (or for) a loner.

So keep this advice in mind, my would-be female colleagues and peers: Don’t be a fembot.

It may make you particularly effective at your job, but it also makes you that much easier to unplug.

Related reading:
Margo Epprecht, The real reason women are leaving Wall Street (Quartz, September 5, 2013)
Fingernails that Shine Like Justice (May 21, 2007)
Can’t Buy Me Love (April 29, 2012)
She’s Trading Her MG for a White Chrysler LeBaron (March 2, 2013)


¹ I cite myself:

Another answer may be that the duration, timing, and demands of an investment banking career are simply incompatible with many women’s other important interests. In particular, while an analyst typically has a two- or three-year stint directly after college, after which most are encouraged to leave and get an MBA (and some elect to make the jump into private equity or hedge funds), a woman entering investment banking as an associate after business school can anticipate at least a decade before she can begin to exercise some measure of control over her life. Associates usually start in their mid- to late twenties, spend three to five years before promotion to Vice President, and then spend four to seven years or more getting to Managing Director. All during that time, they work incredibly long hours, travel like maniacs, and basically do not have any personal life to speak of. For many women, this span from their mid-twenties to their mid-thirties coincides with what they envision as the period when they will get married and start a family. While this is true for many men, also, I think most of us can agree that committing to a career in investment banking is a much more fraught and difficult decision for a woman than it is for a man. This stage is also one when junior bankers are not making enough money to make it feasible to hire full time help to care for young children. A female Vice President is certainly physically capable of having a baby while traveling 150 days a year and working upwards of 80 hours per week, but unless her spouse or partner is rolling in dough him- or herself (or willing to stay at home), she simply will not be able to afford to outsource its care.

² The rare exceptions, like Sandy Weill’s designation of in-house lawyer Chuck Prince as his successor at Citigroup, demonstrate the wisdom of this practice. Sales-driven organizations look for leadership among their moneymakers.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

To Whom It May Concern

“There are two kinds of people who are staying on this beach: those who are dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

— Col. George A. Taylor

“Sarge, do you think there’s a bullet out there with your name on it?”
“No, Private, but I worry a helluva lot about the bullets with ‘To Whom It May Concern’ written on ’em.”

— Possibly apocryphal

If any big investment bank was foolish enough to hand me control of its new recruit training program, O Dearly Beloved, I think I’d open the “Managing Your Career” portion of the schedule with a screening of the first 27 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. This is the famous extended opening scene depicting the assault on Omaha Beach on the first day of the Normandy invasion in World War II. The scene is so brutal and realistic many D-Day and Vietnam War combat veterans got up and walked out of theaters rather than finish watching it.

Now, notwithstanding the opinion some of you scamps may have of my character, this is not because I’m a sadistic control freak who enjoys pulling power plays on a bunch of dewy-eyed young lads and lasses.¹ Nor is it because I want to equate the challenging but relatively cosseted work lives of a bunch of aspiring members of the socioeconomic elite with the life and death business of flinging young mens’ bodies against bullets, bombs, and shredding metal in pursuit of killing other young men.

No, it is because I think it would behoove most of these eager tyros to understand just what kind of forces are arrayed against them as they attempt to make their way in my business. There is a mythos in investment banking, consciously cultivated by investment banks and believed in no more fervently than by its recent recruits, that my business is a purely meritocratic one. It is how we attract so many of the “best and brightest” to the industry in the first place. It is the mantra we drum into their heads in every recruiting interview, performance review, and compensation discussion: Be smart, aggressive, hardworking, and a team player, and you will succeed beyond the dreams of avarice.

But stated this way, this is bullshit. These traits may arguably² be necessary, but they sure as hell aren’t sufficient.

* * *

Luck—good, bad, indifferent—plays a huge role in anyone’s success in my business. So much of what affects what investment bankers do is beyond our ability to control: the state of the markets, the path of the economy, the success or failure of our clients’ firms compared to their competitors, changes in the regulatory environment, the hiring or firing of personal friends or enemies in decision making roles at clients and potential clients. These are just a few of the boons or impediments which can deliver success far beyond our deserts, or scuttle years worth of unpaid work and preparation in a single afternoon. And this is just business as usual. Forget huge secular tail- or headwinds like the Great Moderation and the Housing Bubble or the Panic of 2008 and the Great Regulatory Unwind we are living through today.³

In both cases, the good and the bad, most of what happens to individual investment bankers can be boiled down to being in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time. Over a career spanning more than 20 years, I have seen good and bad bankers alike buoyed far above their proper station by sheer blind good luck or crushed and harried into early retirement by its opposite. There is no sense to it that I can see. It is true that a finely tuned political sense can blunt the bad and accentuate the good, but this skill evolves into one of those necessary traits an investment banker needs as he or she climbs the ladder. It is not sufficient either.

You can see both the naïve belief in meritocracy by one of our members and the gradual realization that perhaps all was not as advertised in paired interviews of the same banker, conducted two months apart, on Joris Luyendijk’s banking blog at The Guardian, here and here. The smug, eager triumphalism of the first interview gives way to resignation and a dawning understanding in the second that his fate was never fully in his own hands. He volunteers a quote which mirrors my metaphor above:

Looking back I may have fallen victim to the self-serving idea that we control our fate; as long as you’re good nothing bad can happen to you, and since nothing bad has happened to me, it must mean I am good and therefore safe; that sort of thing. In the same way military men tell themselves that they can’t die because they don’t make mistakes. But the best soldier can drive over a land mine.

Go back and watch the beginning of Saving Private Ryan if you’re up to it. The fates of all those soldiers maimed and killed on Omaha Beach had virtually nothing to do with their skill, their character, or their perseverance. That is what makes the scene so realistic. And so deeply disturbing.

All the skill in the world won’t save you if your number is up.

* * *

But this is not to say that a career in investment banking is a total crapshoot, or that skill and hard work are meaningless, or even that my silly business looks anything like a wartime charnel house on most days. Like soldiers, investment bankers do need to be highly trained, hard working, aggressive, and persevering. A quick and nimble intelligence helps too. Without those traits, the odds are stacked against you. Just like landing Higgins boats full of fat, out of shape, untrained soldiers on the beaches of Normandy would have resulted in even greater slaughter, you don’t want to go into battle on an IPO or an M&A trade with dim, lazy, unengaged, incurious loners who are going to lower your odds of success. You can’t guarantee deal or career success in my business without some measure of smarts, guts, and tenacity—you can’t guarantee against abject failure, either—but at least you can tilt the odds somewhat more in your favor. Every little bit counts.

I’ve always told my junior bankers they should not worry too much about working on successful deals early in their career. While working on successful deals is always more fun than working on failures, they are not responsible for producing revenues the way someone like me is. That is why most investment banks work very hard to protect their junior bankers from wholesale cuts under most circumstances.⁴ Besides, it is my firm belief that you learn far more about my business and the people in it—clients, counterparties, and colleagues—from observing broken deals than you do from the successful ones. You become a better banker by experiencing and learning how to deal with failure, and the best clients are always looking for the banker who knows what to do when the train jumps the rails.

So, future Jamie Dimons of the world, I’ll give you the same advice I’ve given my Analysts, Associates, and Vice Presidents for years: keep your head down, work hard, and keep your wits about you. If you do get hit, at least you can take pride you did everything in your power to survive and thrive.

And I promise I’ll stand you a drink on the other side.

If anyone’s gonna catch a bullet, it’s most likely gonna be me.


Related reading:
Joris Luyendijk, Happy banker: ‘There's something narcotic about landing a big deal’ (The Guardian, July 19, 2013)
Joris Luyendijk, Happy banker, post-redundancy: ‘I still don’t think investment banking is a terrible environment’ (The Guardian, July 19, 2013)
Overheard at 85 Broad Street (June 18, 2008)
Go Ahead, Live a Little (May 12, 2013)


Photo credit: Saving Private Ryan.
¹ Although that could be a useful ancillary effect.
² The recent articles on investment banks hiring the idiot sons and daughters of powerful clients and potential clients is only the most recent proof that such an argument has always been counterbalanced by other considerations, at least in a minority of cases.
³ Or the elevation of friends or enemies into positions of power at your own firm. That’ll help or hurt you more than anything most of the time.
⁴ The exceptions to this, while generally execrable, usually only happen when industry or firm conditions are particularly dire.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

10 Reasons I’m Not Posting Anymore

1) I’m bored. — Nothing remotely interesting is happening in the world of finance to prompt my poison pen. Tapering? SEC and DOJ prosecutions of financial crimes? Jewelry thefts from billionaire tenements? Please.

2) Nobody has emailed me recently with any clever ideas to steal. — This usually reliable source of notions I can appropriate as my own and dazzle the assembled masses has dried up miserably. What’s the problem? Have you people gotten stingy on me or something?

3) Those items of finance news which are “happening” in the world are way above my pay grade. — Monetary policy? Insider trading jurisprudence? Vera Wang’s bracelet collection? I have trouble remembering to button my suit pants before I zip them. Give me something simple, like Jamie Dimon’s hat size. Or epistemology.

4) Nobody’s offered me a book deal. — What? You thought I wrote this shit out of the goodness of my heart?

5) I’m lazy. — So what? It’s summer. Give me a fucking break. None of my clients bothers to get into the office before eleven, either. (That’s if they’re not sipping mojitos on the deck of their beach houses by then.)

6) I’m busy. — Trying to get various clients and counterparties to shit or get off the pot already. I’m only writing this because I have nothing to do for the next 20 minutes but wait for a return phone call. Lots of hurry up and wait in my business.

7) I can’t figure out how to make slideshow listicles. — Anyway, the last two times I made a listicle you clowns only read one of them. Ungrateful wretches. I like pageviews, too.

8) I’ve already said everything I have to say. — About fifty billion times, too. Even I bore me.

9) Uh... I forget. — What? You expect an investment banker to know how to count? Or not overpromise and under deliver? Hahahahahaha. Silly rabbits.

See you in September. Maybe.<sup>1


1</sup> No, no footnotes for you today. Go away.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.