Confessions of a Cat-holic (221)

The DCM division was really intense. We had an excursion in Jersey for the summer interns. It was a hunting trip in the forest. The activities in New York and Hong Kong were two polar extremes. I really missed the time I ordered coffee and lunches for my colleagues at Lehman. They sometimes asked me to fetch a book fair ticket for the clients, running errands here and there. It was all manageable. And to be honest, it was a good break from sitting in the office all day too. Hunting in Jersey was too intense for me.

The interns in the DCM were a mix of races. Apparently, there was a black intern at the group but she was so lazy and incompetent that the manager made her leave before the internship ended. That's where I came in. I was replacing the black girl before me. My boss was a blonde woman and she was trash talking the black intern the entire time because the black girl was so not up to her expectations. I went through a lot of stress because I didn't want to be that black girl who got yelled at behind the back. Apparently, they already fired 3-4 interns within the first couple of weeks. The DCM division was really demanding, I had a feeling.

Then there was another guy intern in my group. He was old. He was about 30 years old. He shouldn't be an analyst, given that he looked more mature than the rest of us. But he was a veteran. That was why he was older. He went to West Point and was stationed in foreign countries before he landed a job at Morgan Stanley. He had no financial knowledge at all, he was asking really basic questions about products and markets the entire time. But the manager loved him there. He was driven, tough and strong willed. He was also physically very built. I believed military training was transferrable in Wall Street.

At my desk, I was placed in a film securitization group. Now, many of you might wonder what the hell was that. It was basically a class of ABS. ABS stood for asset backed securities; they packaged assets that generated cashflow and packaged them into different tranches to sell to different institutional investors with different risk appetites. Unlike MBS, the ABS cashflow was hugely variant. It was less stable, and the underlying collateral was the copyrights and proceeds of a movie instead of land or houses. But still, it would be better than say credit card loans lacking an underlying collateral. I had to build a financial model that would project the box office revenues of future movies. I had to predict the income generated from this asset class so I could help the syndicate disseminate the products.

My work was very tedious. In order to predict the cashflow, I needed to find out the revenues of all Hollywood movies in the past 20 years, including box office revenues and rental proceeds. I had to find all these out from the internet within 2 weeks. Could you imagine this workload? I was then convinced why the hell junior bankers had to pull 100 hours a week for this crappy job. Movie revenues were already better than say, like a cashflow model of a clothing company, which I had no knowledge of. My boss asked me to go watch a movie that week. I did, so I watched the pursuit of happiness and the devil wears Prada. It was a good time. But I really hated the data searching work. To be honest, could box office revenues even be predicted with past statistics anyways? I doubted it. But I had to do it anyways. I was paid to do this job so I'd better be good at it.

Eric Tsang asked me to do something similar the summer before. He asked me to estimate the total amount of assets under SAFE and calculated the market share of Lehman's China sales team. Well, it was freaking high. Eric's team amounted to around 15% of market share out of SAFE's entire portfolio. That was some astronomical number.

I constantly got off work after 9pm. If we stayed past 10pm, we could reimburse our dinners. I asked Edmond to take me to Tokyo Joe and Petrus when he worked at Merrill. It was just in Lan Kwai Fong and we always swiped his corporate card. That was one way of him showing off his perks working at Merrill. But lunches at Morgan Stanley were just sushi takeouts. We had to eat on our desk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LDg0YGYVw4