Confessions of a Cat-holic (201)

I needed this internship as much as I needed my boyfriend. Eddie was the prime reason why I wanted to try New York. I wanted to get a return offer so I could stay with him after graduation. If it wasn't for him, I really wouldn't want to live in a foreign country as an alien. But he was not very helpful as a boyfriend. I didn't know what I was in his eyes. He didn't take me out to dinners; he didn't invite me to his friends' events; he didn't even call me after he graduated. He just disappeared, with no phone calls, no voice messages nor a handwritten note to talk me through where we were in terms of our intimacy and relationship. I had no way to reach him when he didn't feel like it. This was very unsettling for me.

I needed to move to Water Street for the summer so I could focus on my work. This internship would not be a breeze so I was prepared to work my ass off, without the distraction of a hot guy in my room. But Eddie wouldn't even help me move in. I had to carry a 30-pound baggage all the way across Manhattan. He didn't want to make my life easier, obviously. I felt that every time I was with him, he was taking something from me. He never cooked for me; he never gave me a massage; he never helped me with my homework. I was always the one taking care of him, but with that internship, I knew I wouldn't have the capacity to babysit another person. He just wanted to sleep with me, and I swore to god I did not want to get pregnant over my summer internship.

The internship started with a notice of our placement. I was placed in government trading, to my surprise. I totally didn't expect it. I wanted to be in sales, but they put me in trading. Trading was a man's job, even though there was a Canadian girl in that team. But if you had been to the trading floor, you would see that the girl:boy ratio in trading was like 1:100, and I was not exaggerating.

I liked playing poker. By all means, I loved the mind games; but gambling? Never a fan. Gambling could be stressful as hell, especially if you were betting with your own money. In trading, you could either be a flow trader or a proprietary trader, or a mix of both. A flow trader was a market maker, meaning that you earned the spread by providing liquidity. The trick was simple, you would buy low and sell high, the difference of the two would be the spread. The wider the spread, the more you gained from the trade; but it was usually offset by liquidity. If the product was ready to trade and easy to replace in the market, the spread would usually be thin. If the product was hard to get rid of, the spread would usually be huge, because of the risks involved. But market makers, or flow traders were usually relatively risk-free, because you were just providing liquidity to the market with no position. Proprietary trading on the other hand was much harder to manage. You would have a portfolio to look after and the gains and losses would directly affect your bonuses. You would also have to take positions, long or short the securities with a view and expectation. It was very much like gambling, especially if you were in equities. Fixed income? Not sure. For treasuries, it could be a game of predicting the next Fed rate hike.

Trading or banking in general was very much like a sports game. It could be why the trading floor was filled with athletes. It took tenacity as well as acute judgement sometimes. Many people looked at Wall Street with awe and fantasy, that the traders were some sort of genius with a halo. No, it really wasn't. When you watched the Olympics, would you dream to be that athlete with the gold medal? Would you be ready to devote that much effort that the champion had put in over years of practice with all the training, pressure, competition and possibly injuries? The general public tended to look at only the trophy but forgot the less fortunate ones who fought hard along their way in pursuit of championship. This was what it meant by survivorship bias, if you could see through Wall Street from an athlete's point of view.