m****s
发帖数: 7397 | 1 Proprietary Trader Wanted for Promising Career: Matthew Lynn
2010-10-18 23:00:00.1 GMT
Commentary by Matthew Lynn
Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) -- These are dark days if you work in
proprietary trading. For the past five years, you have been the
king of financial markets, raking in bonuses and enjoying the
prestige that comes from making most of your bank’s profits.
Now you are about as employable as a Greek-bond salesman.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are two
companies winding down their prop-trading units to comply with
new regulations that limit the ability of financial firms to
trade on their own account. Plenty more firms will follow suit.
Teams of traders fired by big banks are now setting up
dozens of hedge funds. But hold on. Surely the one thing you
learned during all those years on the trading desk is that there
is no money to be made by following the herd. When everyone else
is buying bonds, pile into equities. When the whole world is
chasing the gold price higher, buy the dollar.
Who wants to be the 13th former Mega-Bank derivatives
trading team knocking on the doors of pension-fund managers
hustling for a few million to be invested in your new high-
frequency yak-hide futures fund?
It’s hard to stand out in a crowded field. And even if you
do find some investors, there is a big difference between being
the trading arm of a bank with a few billion on its balance
sheet, and just some guy with a nice suit, a new Blackberry, and
a smart sales pitch. The former gets to push the markets around.
The latter is easily ignored.
Career Switch
There’s no point going into business for yourself if you’re
just doing the same thing you were doing for the bank. You need
to plan a career switch.
Focus on the skills you developed on the prop-trading desk,
and decide where else they can be applied with equal success, if
not comparable remuneration. After all, there must be plenty of
industries in need of self-glorifying, hyper-competitive young
men and women with micro-second attention spans.
Here are five to think about:
Social-networking entrepreneur: Get rid of the suit, but
keep the high-end smart-phone and you can become one of the
Facebook or Twitter clones. Your easygoing charm and ability to
limit your focus on any one subject to only a few minutes will
make you a natural. Even better, you’ll know precisely whom to
call in six months’ time when you are ready to sell out to a
clueless, old media dinosaur.
Divorce lawyer: Remember all those hedge-fund wives you
never quite got around to talking to at those charity evenings
with your clients? At least half of them will be divorcing their
husbands in the next five years. Retrain and become their
lawyer. They will need someone as ruthless and rapacious as they
are. You’ll also have a good idea which bank in the Cayman
Islands their husbands might have hidden their assets in.
Admittedly, the shallowness and viciousness of your clients
might be disturbing at first. It will be far worse than anything
you saw in prop trading. But at least you’ll get sweet revenge
on that guy who stuffed you on the oil trade last year.
Piracy negotiator: The shipping industry is getting taken
to the cleaners by a few Somali teenagers equipped with a couple
of hundred dollars’ worth of AK-47s. They take the ship, then
get a few million dollars to release it. It’s crazy. What the
shippers need is someone on the other side of the trade who
knows how to play hardball. Delay. Scream and shout. Talk the
pirates into taking a bunch of Hungarian bonds instead of cash.
Then send some mercenaries in to get rid of them. After a few
months of negotiating with you, the Somalis will happily go back
to tuna fishing.
Regulator: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan may be closing their
prop-trading units. But maybe they are just giving that desk a
new name. After all, prop trading was where they made money. The
average pen-pushing career bureaucrat won’t have a clue how to
spot that. Offer to work for a regulator and negotiate a bonus
payment for every prop trading desk you identify. You’ll only
increase the odds of catching the next big meltdown after every
regulator failed to spot anything before the credit crunch.
Personal shopper: Go to one of those big, swank London
department stores where women from Saudi Arabia and Moscow go to
spend a few million petrodollars. Become one of their personal
shoppers, reassuring them how fabulous that Tiffany necklace
looks with that Prada bag. After all, playing with other
people’s money is what you’ve been doing all along.
There are plenty of other possibilities. The point is that
the glory days of prop trading are over. But just because you
are redundant, it doesn’t mean your skills are. Just find a new
way to apply them.
(Matthew Lynn is a Bloomberg News columnist and the author
of “Bust,” a forthcoming book on the Greek debt crisis. The
opinions expressed are his own.) | d*****e
发帖数: 7368 | | m****s
发帖数: 7397 | 3 i just read it. on Bloomberg.
【在 d*****e 的大作中提到】
: hehe, you just know it?
| d*****e
发帖数: 7368 | 4 Fed sits in our group since Jan this year:)
【在 m****s 的大作中提到】
: i just read it. on Bloomberg.
| m****s
发帖数: 7397 | 5 有 must have done something wrong!
【在 d*****e 的大作中提到】
: Fed sits in our group since Jan this year:)
| d*****e
发帖数: 7368 | 6 no, my guess is that since then they want to shut down prop trading in big
banks.
【在 m****s 的大作中提到】
: 有 must have done something wrong!
| m****s
发帖数: 7397 | 7 坏苹果！！
【在 d*****e 的大作中提到】
: no, my guess is that since then they want to shut down prop trading in big
: banks.
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