Confessions of a Cat-holic (209)

My boss on the treasury trading desk was an Indian guy. His name was Sanjay Gupta. (I was not sure if that was his name, but in my vague memory, that was the closest I could get in guessing.) He was about in his thirties, maybe early forties. He had a family, I saw his family portrait at his desk. We sat on a long bench in the middle of the trading floor. Treasury trading usually took up the best spot on the trading floor. When I was working at Lehman, my desk was next to Eric Tsang in the middle of the trading floor overseeing the Victoria Harbour. When I looked up above my monitor, I could see the CEO's 360-degree glass pane office in the corner. Kirk Sweeney's office was about 200 square feet, overseeing the entire trading floor.

Treasury trading was about the same at Morgan Stanley. The MDs had a corner office but they usually sat out on the trading floor when market opened.The Morgan Stanley treasury trading team consisted of about 7 people. My Indian boss was an MD, and he told me he went to Columbia too. After all, Columbia was a major feeder school for Wall Street. Then there was a white guy in his mid thirties under him and a few other juniors. The analyst in the team was a white Canadian girl named Nicola White. She looked like an athlete. I was surprised she came all the way from Canada to work at Morgan Stanley. First of all, she needed a visa to stay in the states. I heard it was a lottery, chances were you might get into the best firm in the world and still needed to give up your offer if you could not secure a work permit. She was young, as you could tell from her work title. She was pretty tall and attractive too. I wouldn't know why she would come to New York for such a stressful job. Canadians were known to be more chilled and laid back. I really couldn't see why she would want to move to a new country for a trading desk in mid Manhattan. The lifestyle of New York really didn't appeal to me. If it wasn't for Eddie, I really wouldn't want to enslave myself in a bank to earn a paycheck that could barely pay my rents. If it was private wealth management at Merrill, that would be different. Well, I could totally try knocking on its door and hunt for good will (like Matt Damon's inspirational movie). After all, 80% of my unpaid work at Merrill was cleaning up dead people from their client database and registering their death certificates. I was really not sure if they would be benevolent enough to hire me as a foreigner to work for them. I had my reservations, of course.

The first day of work was already awful. I was wearing a beige skirt up to my knee with a black knitted top. Nothing sleazy, nothing revealing. Just a formal skirt I bought from Forever 21. Analyst pay really was not that great. Forever 21 was all I could afford at the time, and maybe Zara too. Even Zara was a bit pricy for me, I had to admit. The traders all had up to 6 screens on each workstation. They had to monitor the markets closely to come up with the right prices. They wouldn't talk during the day, even among themselves. They just looked at the screens and executed trades on a few clicks. When I worked at Lehman, the buyback price for mini bonds was about 60% off their principal value, a very big haircut. Bond prices moved differently from equities. In equities, it was the face value only, as straightforward as that. But when bond prices fell, it usually was a result of interest rates, or rating, or both. The yields would increase though. If the buyer held it to maturity, it really wouldn't matter what happened to macro-economic climate or the face value, unless it defaulted or became a junk bond.

I was asked to sit next to my Indian boss on a chair with no backrest. They set up a laptop for me, a temporary workstation so I could check some market news on the internet. But it was nothing like their Bloomberg machines. I was asked to observe and stare at their day to day work, to shadow the senior traders and to facilitate their trading decisions.