Tired? Need Sleep? Want a Break?

If you see something rotating – go home, you need a break!

Recent studies suggest that the current economic meltdown is taking a toll on America's best and brightest, producing record numbers of bankers, attorneys, and executives seeking help for depression. So, if haven't been working hard and the circles are still spinning, get some help!








Click on image to enlarge.

Sartorial Tutorial

Waiting for a batch of presentations to print at the print room so you can go home, you scroll BusinessWeek for something worth poking fun at, when you come across an article giving sartorial tips for would be investment banking job candidates.


The article reads that you need to spice up a dark pinstripe and white shirt with a power tie in maroon or red. Being rather taken aback by the fact that a someone is recommending wouldbe investment bankers to look like essex boys with a makeover, you finally get over the fact that the you are most displeased at the mediocrity of the suggestion. You take another look at the picture of what an investment banker is supposed to look like, and you decide you've had enough. You write to BusinessWeek, suggesting they check with The All Nighter's article on How I-banking is like Barbie for the true i-banking look.


You dread seeing an army of intens this summer marching in in black tacky pinstripes, white shirts and maroon ties, so being the constuctive, problem-solving, thinking out of the box, individual that you are, you venture out for more on the investment banking look.

The phone rings, and its a call to let you know the books are ready. You go downstairs, pick them up and grab a cab to deliver them to Rupert for his meeting on Monday. It being a Saturday, you decide to do some proper shopping along the way. You decide to shop for the perfect i-banker candidate outfit, take a picture of the finished product and plead with BusinessWeek to revisit their suggestions before it is too late.

First stop, get a tie. Now you may be thinking that Hermes on Bond Street is pit stop number one. No! An intern should never wear an Hermes tie. This is a privilege for full-time employees of the firm. Also, when the intern performs well, by already owning an Hermes tie, they take the boss's pride away, when they buy them an Hermes tie at the end of the internship. So off to Old Bond Street and to ferragamo you go, getting off on Regents street and instructing the cabbie to wait.


You walk into the Ferragamo shop on the corner and browse through printed silk ties with the unmistakeable Ferragamo pattern. Not large and distinctively in your face enough to be a Hermes, but a tuch more geometrical and smaller motif size. Perfect for the intern. From far, the tie looks unobtrusive and will ward off comments from other jealous interns about the intern in question splashing his money around, whilst obvious enough to the trained analyst eye to signal that said intern has potential to upgrade money spending skills to higher ticket items. You finally pick out a fairly neutral bluish piece and take it to the counter.



Next stop, up the road to Ralph Lauren. Perfect place for an intern to get a shirt. You walk into the multi storey store and head straight to the first floor, where the purple lable stuff sits (if one is to buy a pony and polo player emblem shirt, one might as well go to NEXT or the GAP). You look around until you find the right piece. Creamy white, full cutaway collar, cuffed to appeal to a Brit interviewer and just about perfect. Happy with the selection you make your way to the counter.

Next stop, shoes. Off to the King’s Road and Tim Little for a pair of hand made shoes. Keep them clean, conservative and a perfect fit. Yes, perhaps the £1,350 tag is a tad much for a single pair, but you are soon comforted by the fact that the next pair will cost less. You are also comforted to see that the heels are not fully coater with rubber (only the corner in the back). You sit for a measurement and spend another two hours finalizing the style and walk out with a smile on your face, knowing that in a few weeks your brand new shoes will be ready to wear.

Happy with your day’s purchases, you tell the cabbie to take you home. You get a call from Rupert whilst in the cab, asking why the books are so late. You explain that the cabbie got the address wrong, and came back, so you had to call another one and send them again. Perfectly reasonable and having reassured Rupert, you get out of the cab, confirm the delivery instructions and get home.

Final touch. You call your tailor to confirm an appointment for Monday. He’ll come to the office. 10AM.

You recap on the day’s work. Damn it feels great to be an i-banker.

Tie. Only £70?
Shirt. Below £200 Bargain.
Shoes. Hand made for £1,350.
Looking like an Investment Banker. Priceless.

Mont Blanc and the BPM

You are by now well aware of the fact that i-bankers don’t make much sense. They talk the talk, and rely on their BPM to dazzle their audience into believing that they have something very meaningful, something profound to say. Looking closer at the BPM, it consists of two parameters:


Parameter 1 = bullshit
Parameter 2 = time


Bullshit in its own right is insufficient to daze the audience and the i-banking “magic” does not happen. It is only by manipulating the time element, that a true i-banker can manage to say nothing but at the same time impress their client. Remember, that if the audience has sufficient time to step back and think about what the i-banker is saying, the BPM principal breaks down and the cause is lost. The client will realize that what the banker is saying has no meaning and does not make any sense whatsoever. They will also be able to identify the numerous flaws in the argument and inconsistency in the data used, stemming from the inevitable fact that the investment banking professional will naturally be bullshitting.

Why then, does every banker have a Mont Blanc pen? You look around you, and every monkey on the floor has one. The little plain black pen with a blob on the cap. That’s it. Rob has two tucked away in his desk. Rupert carries one in his jacket at all times. Frank used one in the meeting at Kruelberg. EVERY banker has one of these babies. Why?

It’s a complete contradiction to the BPM theory of investment banking existence. BPM, as described above, is underpinned by minimizing the timeframe within which a specific quantity of bullshitt is uttered by an i-banker. While in its on right, the use of a Mont Blanc pen is not in contradiction to this theory, its use substantially reduces an i-banker’s BPM through increasing the time over which the target audience may absorb the bullshit. One may say that it creates the effect of the available time approaching infinity, and as your excel spreadsheet can tell you, even the biggest bullshit, when divided by infinity is zero. Ergo, using a Mont Blanc pen reduces an i-banker’s BPM to zero! Why? Because once bullshit is put on paper, the audience can take their time to try and understand it, and in not being able to do so, figure out how useless it all is. Even worse, the client may choose to give up on the bullshit altogether and simply bin it!

So why, you ask yourself, do i-bankers still swear by their Mont Blancs? Simple. Because a Mont Blanc with the unmistakeable whit blob on the cap is one of the easiest ways of telling someone that you can afford to pay £200 for a pen, without even opening your mouth.

Meet Henrietta Pizza

As with every hot shot i-banking department, Rupert’s group is bringing lots of cash for the firm, which translates into Rupert having a disproportional allocation of pretty much anything he wants. This continuum remains until Rupert’s clients realize that his banker’s advice is rubbish and that they’re better off banking with another firm. Worry not for Rupert though, because it takes clients a few years to figure this out, and by the time they switch, he’ll have been headhunted into that firm, anyway, so good luck to you if you are a client. Once you’ve got Rupert as an advisor, you can kiss your share price goodbye.

Being recruitment season, and Rupert being made acutely aware of the desperate need to get more analysts*, Rupert pushes for more than the London office has allocated to be his fair share. As magically happens when Rupert asks, Rupert gets. One bright Monday morning, a little Italian analysts makes her way onto the floor and to the cubicle designated for her with all the subtlety and finesse of a 747 trying to land on a little sports airfield in Kent. Meet Henrietta Pizza, the team’s newest addition to the analyst ranks straight from the New York office.

As you soon find out a little bit about Henrietta, not because you asked, or were introduced, but because you couldn’t help overhearing the ‘conversation’ Henrietta was having with Rob, six cubicles away, that sounded something like this:

Rob: “Welcome to the team. We are fortunate to have such a well regarded analyst”
Henrietta: “E’ IT IS ‘A PLESUR TO ‘A COME ‘A TO A SUCH ‘A GOOD ‘A TEAM. I’ ‘A WAS ‘A THE TOP’A RANKED’A ANALYST IN A DA NEW’ A YORK’A THIS A’YEAR”

As Rob recovers his posture from the near blasting of the sound barrier by Henrietta’s recital, and his hair looks like he’s gelled it back in a true Wall Street Gordon Gecko style.

A smile creeps onto your face as you observe Rob struggle to keep his posture as Henrietta unleashed a few more rounds of ‘conversation’. You close your eyes and picture Rob wearing full body armour and sporting a massive sword, fighting fire breathing dragon, whose fire breathes an Italian accent. You enjoy the thought for a few brief moments and open your eyes again.

Rob has manages to retreat and is licking his wounds as he (probable is merely pretending as a way of getting away from Henrietta) holds his mobile phone to his ear and swiftly walks away towards his cubicle.

That very second, your phone rings. You pick it up only to hear Rob at the other end:

[Whispering] “Play along, my life is at stake”
[Loud] “Hi, it’s Rob. I got your email that you urgently want to speak to me”
[Whispering] “Ok, cheers mate. She’s out of hearing range. Did you see that. I’a’do’a’lot’a’da’eM’and’A’a in ‘a’da’New’a’York’a. Haha. I bet you tomorrow morning she’ll march into the office singing:

I don’t know but I’ve been told,
Banking is my path to gold,
I’ll do your pitches, deals and shit,
I’ll do all-nighters no regret,

I’ll earn top dollar, be first in class,
Coz I’m the queen of kissin’ ass,
The needs of the many above the few,
The firm’s much bigger than me and you,

Pizza is my second name,
Investment banking is my game,
You’ve been told so now you know,
Henrietta the banker is real gung ho!”

Sadly, your rolling on the floor laughing exercise must come to an end as you realize you have been laughing so hard that you desperately need to use the little boys’ room.



Notes:
* Associates and senior analysts push for greater numbers of junior analysts so that they can dump all their work to these poor, excited souls with the pretext of helping them climb the ‘steep learning curve’.

Christmas Time in the City

Ho! Ho! Ho! It’s Christmas time in the city and the admin staff is busy trying to find a venue for the department’s Christmas dinner. The dinner is a big event where Rupert shelves out a load of cash (carves out a portion of the department’s entertainment budget provided by the firm) and invites everyone in the department to a boozy dinner followed by a bar and club night.

You relish the fact that you will be privy to rub shoulders with the top brass in a social context, whilst not having to shelf out a penny! What a deal! The admin staff have been spending half their time on the phone and surfing the web to come up with shortlists of restaurants, clubs and bars for the various legs of the evening. Whilst focussing on this very important goal (important owing to Rupert’s role as its patron), they have conveniently neglected filing your expense claims and as you will surely find out later, you will be financing the firm’s corporate entertainment expenditure out of your own pocket because they won’t be able to reimburse your flight and hotel claims until late February, but that’s in the new year and not for now to worry about.

You decide it is a good idea to participate in this “team building” exercise, so you walk over to Melinda’s desk. Melinda is a rather typical i-banking secretary. Although she has been with the firm for over five years, she still gives people the impression that they have dialled incorrectly and have been connected to an industrial state in Essex – there have been cases where clients from overseas have a apologised and redialled, thinking that they were really put through to Melinda in Essex by mistake. Mental note – be sure to pick up your own phone at all times. Ah, but bless, Melinda is a nice girl, means well when she wants to. The only problem is that doesn’t happen to be very often.

You lean on her cubicle, smile (when faced by a such a formidable enemy, one must do one’s best to avoid conflict at all costs) and ask if you can give her a hand.

“Aw kay, posh boy. I’m trying taw get us a tayble at Annabell’s but they say they’re fully booked. That’s a load of shite, innit. Gawon, call them in your hoity toity voice and help us out.”

You agree to put your voice to good use, and jump at the opportunity to become the team hero by securing Bouji’s for after the dinner. You dial, politely ask for a table, smile and hang up. You quickly wipe the smile away, lest Melinda gets the idea that she aught to lecture you on how the class system in British society is still not eradicated and that this is a true disgrace.

Luckily for you, it worked.

“Saw, did yaw ge’ it?”

You relish the fact that the positive response you give Melinda will spread across the floor in a matter of seconds, and you will be the hero who got the team into Annabel’s. Wee done man, you can hear Rupert mumbling at you, after the tenth shot of tequila he will surely have downed by the time you reach the club. And you will modestly respond that it was your pleasure to secure a decent venue for some after dinner entertainment. You can also picture Melinda’s voice in the background as you bask in your glory in front of Rupert, screeching “Aw my, this playce is saaaw posh innit. Oh ya, saw posh indayd”.

You can also picture Henry, one of the VP’s in the team and a sheer disgrace to the world’s ever increasing population of muppets, complaining that the night would have been much more fun at his club of Choice, Bouji’s (which refused to make a booking when he called – well done mate). He will be sure to try to overcompensate for his inability to deliver by leaving his card behind the bar to order everyone a round of drinks. Hammered as he surely will be at that stage, little will he know that you will order the entire club numerous rounds of drinks before he remembers to close the tab. But surely, it’s all in the seasonal flavour of giving. Ho! Ho! Ho!

Sanity check

Its 9am and you see sitting in the boardroom of ScrewedCo, surrounded by Rupert, Rob and Dirk, a managing director from the Holland office. Dirk is a funny animal. The reason he is in this meeting is because he knows the CEO through social circles in Amsterdam. In fact, Dirk doesn't have a clue as to why we are seeing ScrewedCo.

You sent him the presentation at 4am, just when you sent it to the printers, who got it done by 6am - just in time to head with the books to your flat, shower and head to the airport. Your eyes begin to twitch as the effect of the third cup of extra strong black coffee of the morning begins to wane. You feel that (too good to be true) feeling as you ease back in the leather chair and begin to drift to sleep. Ah, bliss.

Your slumber is interrupted by Dirk, who leans over to your chair and taps you on the shoulder.

"Zhet ish a wery goot book you have prepared. Very nish chartsh. But you sheem to have a problem witsh your email. I only resheived it early thish morning. You musht get IT to fix it when you get back to the offish."

No shit sherlock. You don't say I've got a problem. Thee reason you got the email at four AM is because you sent it to him at four AM. Schmuck. What planet does this guy live on?

Ok. He means well, but come on. What third tier commercial bank did the firm pick this guy out of? Does he really not know how i-banking works? You look at him trying to spot clues giving away his lower position in the food chain even though he is an MD. You look for the usual giveaways. Shoes - buffed and finely made. No joy there. Hands. Clean, well manicured and never carried anything heavier than a ten page pitchnook. Tie. Perfectly matching his suit. Hermes. No joy here. Shirt. Crisp, tailored, cufflinks and no pocket. He even has the extra taste to not have those ridiculously tacky monograms all the nouveau riche bankers pride themselves on. Also, cufflinks are hand made and tasteful. No luck there. Everything about this hit smells like money. Old money at it. He does not behave like a rodeo from Texas wearing a Hermes tie and good suit. This guy is actually more impressive than Rupert. For one thing, he doesn't wear socks with holes. Granted, he speaks funny, but then again, so does Rupert.

You have a brief moment of panic as you see this non i-banker exhibiting all the attributes of a BSD and then some. Are you in the wrong job? Should you begin speaking with a funny accent and ask to be relocated to Amsterdam? You seem relieved to notice that the panic quickly subsides and is replaced by the peaceful lull of sleep, as you sink into the leather chair.

"Gentlemen."

The CEO walks in his army of cronies. Shit. Shitty shitty shit. Sleep will have to wait. You know that you need to be on standby to bail Rupert out when he inevitably fucks up presenting. You cheer yourself up by the fact that you really see indispensable to the firm, whilst learning from some of the best minds in the business.

Aha.

I used to be a nice guy – and now I’m a banker

It’s the weekend, and by some stroke of luck, you have managed to get your Sunday afternoon free. Nobody’s called you and no emails popped up on your blackberry for a full three hours (you actually called IT and got them to make sure that everything was ok with the company server and that all that important email traffic from your associate wasn’t getting clogged up somewhere between his blackberry and yours only to find that everything was a-ok). You are a free man for the evening. After making a few calls to your intern buddies, only to find out that they are stuck at the office, you sit on your couch and stare at the TV. You switch to Bloomberg out of sheer guilt – even though your presence is obviously not required at the office, you can make productive use of your time by keeping up to speed with what’s going on in the markets. No luck here either. Bloomberg is doing a show on how traders spend their bonuses. Flash cars, helicopters and lots of blingedy-bling-bling-bling.

Shit. What are you going to do? You’ve been an intern for a week and you don’t know how to productively use all this spare time. After surfing channels in search of something to stimulate your financially minded braincells, you decide that the TV is not the solution. You decide that the best way to serve the greater i-banking good is to use this time to build your network. You dial a few numbers and get a group of fellow interns to meet for a few drinks at the Eclipse on Walton Street. The dude from Lemming Brothers actually had the nerve to suggest meeting at his (upmarket) corner pub instead – a suggestion which was quickly shot down as no self respecting i-banker can be seen in a pub! Your two other buddies from Moron Stanley beat you to the gun on that one, leaving no doubt that Eclipse was the place to be seen.

You have a shower, gel back your hair in true American Psycho style, put on a crisp starched Polo shirt, beige Polo chinos, brown Church’s laceups, and a light blue Polo jumper (with a perfectly colour co-ordinated soft green polo player) and you’re good to go. You strap your Swiss Army watch to your wrist and wipe the drool off your face as you imagine the way everyone’s jaws will drop when you replace it with your very own Patek Philippe. You are ready to go. You walk outside, hail a cab for the three and a half minute journey to Eclipse and walk in to find the banker boys at a cushy table and a drink waiting for you.

There’s the Moron Stanley IB boys, the Italian from Lemming Brothers fixed income and his Lemming flatmate. The flatmate looks completely harmless. He’s wearing the standard Polo dominated outfit and thick rimmed glasses. He comes across as the rocket scientist that every graduating class has a specimen of. A truly odd species, who has traded in his chequered short sleeved shirt and calculator holster for a pair of miu miu pants, Prada loafers and a Polo shirt and jumper. Nonetheless, you can’t imagine him harming a fly. You can picture him diligently tapping at a discounted cash flow model, trying to make right the $0.0001 by which the balance sheet is of in 2015. Your image is shattered as you pick up a fragment of the conversation, where the Lemming flatmate, with steam almost coming out of his ears says ”…so then I told my associate to fuck off!”, after which he almost downs the remaining half of his Long Island Iced Tea. You slip back into your thoughts and go over what this harmless looking creature is living through. A person who could not harm a fly, flapping about how he told a superior to fuck off. One glance and you wouldn’t have imagined that he ever even had the nerve to complain about anything, and here he is shootin’ his shotgun like this was his daddy’s ranch in Texas. You realize that you are not all that different. You think about this for a second and conclude that you “used to be a nice guy, and now you are an i-banker”.