The Buy Side Read Online Free

lined with long desks on which sit computer screens and telephones. On the trading floor, there are maybe a hundred mostly young men, all of them talking, either on the phone or to one another. The energy they emit is kinetic. My heart, already beating quickly, begins to thump in my chest. Mike leads me down one of the aisles and seats me between two young traders.
    “Get a sense of what we do here,” he says, patting me on the back. Although I’ve only known Mike for a few minutes, I don’t want him to leave. But one of the traders allays my fear with a friendly smile.
    “Where’d you go to school?” The young, sharply dressed trader has the phone receiver cradled in the crook of his neck as he looks at me. “Ohio,” I answer as he punches the lit-up button on the phone and barks something about needing a look in Bristol Myers. “When didya graduate?” I feel like I’m intruding, but somehow he’s able to carry on both conversations simultaneously and seemingly with equal interest. All of a sudden, he bolts straight up from his chair. “Bristol’s opening at fourteen and a half on two fifty,” he yells over to another coworker some twenty feet away. I have no idea what just happened, but I love it.
    Once the opening bell rings, it’s controlled chaos. Everyone is screaming, punching tickers into the keyboard. A trader in his chair rolls down the aisle and ducks to avoid a phone cord that stretches twenty feet. Crumpled balls of paper are shot into wastebaskets. Everyone commands attention: Some stand and some sit. Some have phones on one ear and then both while shouting across the room to their coworkers. The frenzy of movement seems as well choreographed as a fight scene in
West Side Story
.
    A few minutes later, the young trader plugs in a phone for me and tells me to listen in to his conversations. “When I hit the light, you hit yours,” he says. One right after the other, he calls clients, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and other traders. I understand noneof it. It’s like he’s talking in code and at light speed. But in the midst of this litany, one call has a slightly different tone than the rest. The guy talking on the other end is saying something about plane tickets and hotel reservations in Vegas. A plan for a bachelor party is apparently in the works. Midway through the conversation, the young trader realizes I’m still monitoring his line. He holds his hand over the receiver. “Um, you don’t need to listen to this one,” he says. As he talks with his friend I look around. I see a pool of people I want to be with. I’m swept up by the energy, intensity, and utter grandness of it all. I want in.
    I’m pulled from my thoughts by Mike. He walks me over to meet the big boss, a fellow named Donald Crooks, who glad-hands me and asks a quick battery of questions: What school did I go to? Did I play football? What he doesn’t ask is anything that might indicate if I’m right for the job. In fact, I don’t remember, in any of my Wall Street interviews, being asked a question that might qualify me for a job in finance.
    My next eight interviews at such firms as Merrill, KBW, Jefferies, Smith Barney, and UBS are more of the same. All feature modern reception rooms and shirtsleeved managers. All have the energy Lehman had. But each interview seems perfunctory. The fast-talking guys Uncle Tucker steered me to take my résumé and tell me to keep in touch.
    Then I’m at Morgan Stanley on the thirty-third floor, the trading floor. I’m almost at the point when the manager takes my résumé and tells me to keep in touch when the phone on his desk rings. “There’s someone on thirty-seven who wants to meet you,” he says.
    She introduces herself as Stephanie Whittier. She might be forty, but if she is, it’s a nice forty. With raven hair and a figure that fills the dark business suit she wears, she looks a bit like Demi Moore circa
A Few Good Men
. We get on the elevator and go up