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archive 2009 1 january 1 lesson 4 watch your back 2008 2 march 1 january 1 2007 1 december 1 about me northshorehi when all pursuit of do gooder ism fails i just go surfing view my complete profile saturday january 24 2009 lesson 4 watch your back a difficult lesson for me to learn was that the financial world is disturbingly competitive and doesn t always adhere to the same ethics as say central utah i will attribute this lesson to brett gr as a relatively new person at bear stearns i began to realize that i had to distinguish myself in some unique way success and big bonus checks were not doled out simply because you showed up to work my initial strategy was to develop niche areas of expertise on issues relevant to trading and valuing mortgages this would make me indispensable to the sales force and i would facilitate a lot of mortgage trades to demonstrate my expertise i reasoned i would write interesting research reports and circulate them to the sales force to help them stimulate interest with their customers as an academician i felt comfortable with my ability to write and i had already had a few papers published in refereed academic journals the first paper that i wrote was on a recent statement by the financial accounting stand ards board fasb 91 i remember this because i recently found a copy of this report as intended this paper was circulated among the sales staff and it did indeed generate a bit of interest and helped increase my profile among my colleagues as i have stated elsewhere increased profile means that you are selected to be on more ad hoc transaction teams i can remember feeling a bit proud the day that my report was first circulated it prominently featured my name at the top as author and a copy of the paper was placed on the desk of every trader and sales person on the trading floor along with the other daily handouts although the paper was on a fairly obscure topic it immediately generated some buzz and for the first time traders and sales people from the floor came and looked for me and asked me questions this helped to position me as credible on certain aspects of fasb 91 issues and afterwards i was occasionally called on to explain to customers what the various income effects could be as prepayment assumptions changed about mortgage prepayments i felt that this was a moderately successful start so i began another paper i worked on it for about six weeks as i recall in my spare time when not doing little chores for anthony zioudas i created some financial models ran several iterations of different bonds and had organized my thoughts into a second draft ready to polish off and send out to the printer at this point i want to digress a bit and explain how things worked there at bear you see in my mind i was a very valuable guy i had a phd i had really good quantitative skills and i was creative i carried in my mind the esteem that is bestowed by grateful students to their learned professors for granting them enlightenment my ego led me to believe that i was now just on the cusp of conquering the financial world and i was sure that every one of my colleagues respected me and yes they admired me because of my abilities albeit unproven as yet but that was merely a technical matter as a contrast i saw around me several young almost childish kids right out of school some not even having any graduate training in my academic snobbery i thought of them as inconsequential lower in rank than even teaching assistants you have help you grade papers they were of little real concern to me in my pursuit of serious matters one such clique of kids right out of their undergraduate studies was typified by a young guy named brett and a young girl named jody jody it seemed enjoyed a special relationship with blaine roberts who was the head of our financial analytics and structured transactions group jody and brett and their little clique would chat and giggle through much of the day they would give each other little back rubs and just behaved you know like college kids they would go out and party at night with blaine i supposed and generally took life much less seriously than i did i would have barely been aware of their existence but brett was given the seat just to the right of mine on the trading desk their giggling and chatting would sometimes spill over into my space at the desk but i learned to tolerate the disruptions i had often wondered how brett had landed a job in this financial analytics group at bear stearns brett you see had no quantitative expertise no graduate training in business or accounting he was a journalism major but i reasoned he was a friend of jody s and jody had that relationship with blaine it somehow didn t really matter that much to me but i thought of the bonus pool being diluted by these kids that largely wasted their time and how that blaine had his own personal reasons for keeping all of them happy especially jody since i reasoned that their relationship with blaine made them untouchable i simply tolerated their childishness and did my best to ignore them it was best for me to just concentrate on my serious business so returning to my narrative i had completed the second draft of my second paper at bear and i was looking for a bit of free time to polish it off and get it printed i kept a hard copy of the document in my desk drawer about the only personal space that one has on a trading desk to my surprise one day i came into work and there on my desk along with the other materials distributed through the night was a published version of my paper however at the top of the paper my name was completely absent instead it said that the author was the person sitting next to me i was incredulous absolutely dumbfounded how could this be when that person came in and sat at his desk that day i looked at him with complete incomprehension what did you do i asked this is my paper oh he said i m a journalism major i saw you working on the paper and thought that it needed to get out i ve been hired to make sure that the writing of our research reports is of a professional quality so i went through and edited your grammar and sentence structure when i pressed hem for why my name was totally absent from the byline he simply shrugged and said oh don t worry about it we both work for bear stearns i have often wondered since if i handled this the right way i realized that i had left myself completely vulnerable to this act i had simply trusted my things to be undisturbed in an unlocked desk what was i thinking this was new york man not provo utah i felt so naïve so embarrassingly naïve i never said anything to blaine about the paper in fact i changed my entire strategy for distinguishing myself writing was too easy i went for technology posted by northshorehi at 10 13 am no comments sunday march 16 2008 leson 3 make friends today i received an e mail from a friend of mine named steve he was of course commenting on the demise of bear to bring those of you who didn t know today march 16 2008 bear stearns accepted an offer from jpmorgan to buy it at 2 per share a rescue really from imminent bankruptcy due to its lack of liquidity steve worked upstairs at 245 park he was one of the really talented read smart people that bear hired to help them develop the technology etc that kept them competitive and gave them an edge in the market there was a whole group of guys that worked upstairs and every one of them was really smart anyhow steve and i developed a friendship while we were there at bear steve was not an insider at bear at the time there was a lot of political maneuverings going on and steve just liked to do his job and didn t try to endear himself to the more machiavellian players he was liberal in sharing what he knew of finance with others unlike many of the other people who guarded everything they knew as if the calculations of finance were their proprietary knowledge and their guarantees of success steve worked at bear maybe two years at most but during that time we struck up a friendship that has lasted nearly 20 years during either the winter of 1988 or 1989 i remember inviting steve over to my home in new jersey we were going to celebrate the christmas holidays etc and since steve wasn t married i thought that i would share my expansive family with him i knew it would be an interesting visit because steve is jewish at the time he was not extraordinarily religious but he was still very much jewish i as some of you might know have been mormon all of my life and fairly active for most of it and for those who don t recognize this mormon member of the church of jesus christ of latter day saints so steve came for christmas and we had a great time steve met my wife my kids and we just began to converse about a broader range of topics i in turn started visiting steve in new york i met some of his family had the priviledge of meeting his uncle etc we did some things together in the city like that concert in the park series and generally became good friends steve had the uncanny ability to quote virtually anything that robert de niro ever said in a movie and i have always treasured my memories of him excitedly introducing me to the 1986 movie the mission i still love that movie now some 20 years later i am happy to get an e mail or to chat online with steve he was kind enough to have me into his home to eat with his family he keeps a kosher home so i nearly ruined his dishes one time when i tried to help by clearing the table he and his wife and kids have always been of interest to me what is really curious is that i don t look at my friendship with steve as something that will ever result in additional business or somehow make me rich he and i probably will not have the opportunity to work together again or if we do it won t be for anything that will pay off in money he went on into the doctoral program at nyu in finance he has modest needs and he isn t going to go out and take over the world but steve is a good guy my life has been better because i made friends with him friendships are after all is said and done one of the few things that you really treasure so one of the best things you can do not for personal gain in a monetary sense but for real personal gain in a people to people sense is to get to know some your co workers stay in touch with them make friends become rich in friends that is what is really valuable those that you work with especially in a competitive market like the new york financial markets are often among the highest quality people you will ever meet they make great friends posted by northshorehi at 10 11 pm 2 comments monday january 7 2008 lesson 2 where your bread is buttered the second lesson that i learned at bear stearns came from an unlikely source and i ll attribute it to anthony zioudas when i first started at bear blaine roberts introduced me to his right hand guy peter cherasia and it was actually peter that introduced me around and showed me where to sit that first day i don t think that i had 30 minutes of interaction with blaine within the next 3 months peter was the head programmer of the fast financial analytics and structured transactions group at the time he had made himself indispensable in pulling together the technical team and resources required for the implementation of bear stearns mortgage analytics systems chuck ramsey had built a great niche in the market around specified pools of mortgages and selling these specified pools required a lot of database information and the ability to model mortgages based on the specific prepayment expectations of each individual mortgage pool which all required knowing the location of the loan originator and looking at the composition of actual loans in the pool peter was blaine s implementation guy the guy who could make everything work anyhow peter showed me where i sat gave me a brief introduction to what was going on and basically left me alone to get started i began to figure out the position i had been hired for mostly by asking questions of people around me and by generally finding out what others were working on hoping that i would soon see exactly where i could contribute most i think that it was that first day on the job or maybe it was the second day but a very impressive looking guy with dark hair and meticulous grooming came up to me and introduced himself as anthony zioudas he explained that he was working on some presentations for the kingdom of sweden and that he needed me to help him put together an analysis this was great i thought i m already contributing i did all of the work i could to support anthony as quickly as possible and in just a day or so had a great presentation that i proudly gave to anthony i worked long nights my family was still in texas and there didn t seem to be much need for me to go to my lonely apartment any earlier than 10 00pm and started early anthony was often traveling to europe to meet with clients and i was able to provide him with all sorts of analytical help and quite a bit of support before and after each trip anthony would come by and make sure that i had plenty to do using our asset liability model alm or coming up with new analytical tools to measure the efficient frontier of certain debt instruments etc anthony kept feeding me project after project to do and i gladly produced anything i could to help out a few weeks into my work with anthony i started listening to what people were saying anthony was spending a lot of money on his travel he stayed in nice hotels and some said his deals just didn t close this of course made me start worrying a bit i had come to realize that the only way you made money at bear stearns was to work on deals that closed and that were profitable i also came to the realization that despite what i had assumed i didn t work for anthony in fact i didn t really work for any specific person other than blaine who hired me the organization of the fast group at bear stearns at least at that time was really informal you were hired as a resource and just thrown into a pit you were expected to find some way of making yourself valuable you were expected to form little teams to do deals you could find a deal team yourself meaning that you could find a corporate finance person or a trader that knew of some assets for sale you could add value by creating a profitable deal find a trader that would give you pricing and that would hold those assets in inventory and find a sales team that would sell your deal or you could join someone else s deal team and basically work for them it was these deal teams that fought over the spoils won through doing deals each part of the team would argue how much of the profit that they deserved and then the leader of that part of the team would divide up their part with the critical pieces of the team it was about as organized as a pack of dogs tearing at a carcass but this is how things worked at the time here i had spe...