the prestige of banking

"what do you mean you have to work 100+ hours every week? nobody can do that."

"yeah but what if you're getting paid minimum wage??"

"hmm.."


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it is everyone's dream in our society to become a banker.

it started when we were kids. coming home from day care, we would see men dressed sharply in dark colored suits, their ties carefully sticking out so you can clearly see the 'ferragamo' label on them, their shoes so shiny that you can spot a blemish in your reflection on the high quality leather, the looks on their faces wore concern, stress, and calculation. constantly barking commands into their blackberries. constantly in motion, checking their watches, fixing their hair. but overall their image screamed money. success. power. as if nothing else matters more than where the Dow Jones closed at today or whether the new drug was approved by the FDA. if it didn't make a dollar, it didn't make sense.

we looked at them with awe and wonder. true businessmen. our parents kept reminding us, 'that is real success in the world. commanding power and respect, making money, living a comfortable life style.' this line, repeated over and over, deeply ingrained itself in my mind. i wanted the money, the success. to feel important. i kept it close to my heart and knew that i wanted to play an integral role in society as a banker.

as a child, i honed my banking and finance skills wherever possible. although many write off the popular boardgame monopoly(tm) as a game of chance, i studied the manual for days and nights and eventually was able to consistently win the game seven out of ten times. instead of playing with a play keyboard or reading a book that emitted plot-related noises like mooing cows and meowing cats, i was busy familiarizing myself with a miniature banking system by Fischer Price. i am even proud to say that i was able to recite the rules on the instruction manual verbatim.

i argued over technicalities in social games with my class mates. to me, being right took precedence over everyone having a good time. i didn't want to be the agreeable pushover. i knew that in order to succeed i had to have an opinion and then yell it in everyone's faces (i saw that in a movie somewhere and it sure as hell worked). needless to say i didn't have that many friends growing up. but i only saw them as future competition for a big pay check so it didn't bother me.

the minute i was able to enroll into a finance program (i chose NYU Stern first for its job placement because, lets be honest, that should be the only criteria for rating schools. i'm not going to pay $200,000+ just for a piece of paper with some no-name signature on it certifying that i learned shit. also, i chose NYU Stern for its student body of finance tools and douches--and i wasn't going to let anyone out douche me) i did. i was so eager to be a part of the finance world that my parents had to convince me with money to wait until my actual graduation year in high school before i went off to college.

choosing to enroll in Stern was a great choice. not only was i able to flash my prior knowledge of financial markets while sitting in the front row of lecture hall classes in the most douche baggery fashion, but also i made friends with a few like minded individuals. granted, we did not celebrate the true rewards of friendship since we were competing for the same jobs (and yes, finding a job and getting paid should be our first priority, lets get real here), but finding acceptance among peers was one joy of life that i had missed out in my childhood. even though, my chief goal of being the best led me to spend so many late nights in solitary confinement pouring over accounting and financial textbooks.

i was having a great time in college. surrounded by aspiring bankers, feeling the competition, learning as much as i can about the world of finance. i sucked so hard and shamelessly at the teat of every professor i had, just in case he or she had a job lead. all i needed was a foot in the door. i padded my resume with the biggest buzzwords--'managing expectations', 'database maintenance', 'industry research network autonomous high frequency trading'--sometimes even creating my own nonsensical phrases just to catch people's eyes. i was so close to my dream life that sometimes i would lie awake in bed, head swimming with thoughts of prestige, glamor, and torso soaked in my own excited anxious ejaculate.

then all shit hit the fan. the wall street financiers, so convinced that they correctly ran the modern world, truly bit off a little more than they can chew and soon enough, the entire financial system, built on a house of tooth picks glued by false ratings and greed, eventually collapsed. and with its explosive demise went my childhood full of solo monopoly games, knowledge of pro forma financials, and my hope that forfeiting my supple virginity to be ravished endlessly by corporate america will land me a dream job.

like there will even be a job available.

my aspirations of becoming a glorified slave, working 100+ hours in the maze of cubicles in a high rise building in manhattan all vaporized in a matter of minutes. me, among thousands of others in the same position, seeing our futures implode, toying with the ideas that we could find other professions. what a shame to graduate college with a finance degree and end up working as a full time baby sitter. suddenly happy hours and $1 beer on tap didn't seem so lame. and forgoing taxi cabs and walking everywhere. little by little, i had to give up what seemed like an attainable dream, the soulless job just within reach.

i spend nights lying awake, wishing i could be stressing over excel worksheets and dreading client meetings. and now, i have all this free time but no greedy corporation to devote it to. i am a mere shell among many many shells, hollow and unfeeling, purposeless, with only the function and intention to carry out corporate america's trivial bidding. my entire upbringing devoted to banking and now, with the demise of that profession, i am lost in the world. soulless, inhuman.

-andy

the Economy

first and foremost, thanks mike gao, who reminded me of the existence of blogs and to the quiet lull between earnings reports that has allowed me some free time at work to frolick among various servers in what we affectionately call the intar webs.

the following is written tongue in cheek :)

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we are almost there. teetering on the edge, straddling the days of our sheltered suburban public education on one side and a world clouded with uncertainty, hope, and discovery on the other. great, now is the time to finally put to use the hours we spent struggling to attain the 'outstanding mark' in penmanship in the third grade, the knowledge we learned while repackaging the analysis of 'the Great Gatsby' from sparknotes.com for AP Lang, and the understanding of complex social dynamics only derived from stomaching one too many middle school dances. did we ever really know what we were getting ourselves into? what is the long term goal of late night papers and math problem sets?

to make money, my parents said. allright then, making money. but i may have deceived myself into thinking i knew what this meant. selling lemonade or something like that, some milton bradley baby shit. any retard with basic arithmetic skills can do that.

and only a private university--excuse me, a technical/vocational school like NYU stern finance--can fully prepare me for cubicle life. how exciting! the brochure would tell me, while i flip through glossy pictures of smiles, handshakes, opportunities, and success. the world of cubicle life is a world of glory, fighting on the front lines of the battle of finance, always in the line of fire, in the middle of action! and of course, opportunities for great success and money. every word i read made me more excited to be a part of this giant machine that, as they claim, drives the innovation and progress of mankind. i was sold. so where do i sign up, when can i put on that crisp new suit, when do i get my first six figure paycheck?

not so fast, they told me. NYU, the world of finance, wall street, like any organization, requires people to jump through a series of hoops. sure, its not like i've never done that before. so i did. take these classes, join these clubs, say these lines, go through these motions, network like this, don't act too interested, don't act too desperate. before i knew it, it was more than just some plain old pony tricks. it soon became a method of thinking, a way of life. i went in play-doh(tm), molded myself into a small cog, and came out a small piece, uniform with thousands of other pieces, ready to be placed into a big machine. soulless, unthinking, slave.

but i kept qualifying the molding process. its ok, i'll work for a few years and get out, no biggie.

then i was called to duty. the job description detailed all the battle action i will be engaging in, all the excitement and thrill of being on the front line. the financial landscape is constantly changing, always dynamic. be prepared to think quickly on your feet, solve challenging problems on the fly. no weak stomachs, it warned. this is what i believed i was born to do. and damn was i determined to do one hell of a good job.

welcome to cubicle life, i triumphantly told myself. this is it, i made it, i'm doing it. even if i'm failing miserably, i'm doing it. chasing the so-called dream, or was it the dream that they told me i should be chasing? it doesn't matter anymore.

rows and rows and columns and columns of cubicles. people silently tapping away at their keyboards. everyone connected to their computers, hands to the keyboards, eyes to the screens, minds to the computers. this is it, the white collar work place. just like every stereotype of an office that i have seen on TV or in the movies. i'm ready to get started, to get plugged into this giant machine we affectionately refer to as 'The Economy'. i am one impatient baby.

a cold voice refers me to my desk. Row 42, Column AB, like the grid of cubicles is an excel worksheet. on my desk i find two monitors. its like they knew i had ADD, or if i didn't have ADD, i soon will get ADD. i get settled in my black office chair, mess around with the seat height and swivel around in it, feeling the range i get on my chair, how far i can lean back while still being able to use my computer. i fill out some paper work and surf the internet. before i knew it, the work day was ending and people were leaving for home. what a fantastic job, a great first day.

but soon days blurred into weeks blurred into months. the internet was replaced by excel worksheets and microsoft outlook. any idle time for day dreaming was superseded by number crunching and formatting. my fingers became so intimately familiar with the hot keys of excel that when i am working full throttle, my keyboard sounds like one that belongs to a korean starcraft master. sometimes i would work late nights, motivated to work only by fear of failure from a supervisor. i felt like i was cramming for an exam. and day after day, week after week, this became my life. waking up in the morning to punch out numbers on a computer coming home and sleeping only to do the same thing the next morning. i have become a small cog in the big machine.

my life is a cubicle. not only are my testicles shackled to my seat, my thoughts are tethered and monitored by the Company. i can only think what is best for the Company, for Corporate America, for the Economy. in the big chess game between dueling forces that determine the direction of our society, mankind, i am a pawn. indispensable. forgettable. i was created to fight in a battle that i know nothing about.

but i do get paid. and i spend money. and i get paid. and i spend money. sometimes i would catch myself thinking, is there anything more to life than this? probably not. i didn't read it in any glossy brochures or anything.

they will probably find my dead body laying face down in a cubicle one day, with packaging peanuts scattered around, a few post it notes on my desk, excel silently humming away on my monitors. they will see the wounds on my fingers from banging out numbers a bit too intensely, working excel a bit too ferociously. they will find my eyes glazed and unfocused, figuring that my mind has rotted earlier, leaving only my physical body, with the hot keys ingrained from years of building models, left to continue to work. they will look for any signs of medical illness, any previous record of heart disease or high cholesterol or gout, and upon seeing a clean bill of health, write it off as another casualty. it happens, they will say. another sacrifice, albeit necessary, to maintain and preserve the Economy. and two hours into finding my body, they will reset the computers and clean the packaging peanuts, prepare the desk for a new pawn, young, eager, full of ambition, and unaware of his eventual demise.

and the Company will continue to recruit. NYU Stern will continue to tell aspiring young minds to forgo their engineering skills to begin a life full of excitement on the front lines of finance. that supporting the Economy is a good thing. that it is the only thing worth living for.

andy

pictures, continued

i thought of this during ISP class today.

the recruiting event

haha enjoy,

andy

blackcock day of reckoning

hello everyone. for those of you who care enough about my life to continue reading, this entry will be a compilation of the questions i received today at superday. this was for blackrock financial modeling group.

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technical questions:

1)

use C++ to program an entire program (that should compile) that does the following:

takes 4 inputs (number of quarters, number of dimes, number of nickels, number of pennies) and return the total amount of change you have.

2)

what is deconstructing and why is it necessary?

3)

what is a resource like memory that when is allocated, must be de allocated?

4)

you have two random variables X and Y. both of their variances is 1. what is the variance of X + Y?

if given that the covariance between X and Y is 1, what is variance of X + Y?

5)

you have a rock in a boat sitting in a pool. you remove the rock and put it into the bottom of the pool. the rock's density is greater than water. does the level of water increase, decrease, or stay the same?

6)

integrate:

a)

integral of  1/x * dx

b)

integral of lnx  * dx

7)

integrate:

a)

integral from negative infinity to infinity: x* e^ (-x^2/2) * dx

b)

integral from negative infinity to infinity: e^(-x^2/2) * dx

find two more methods of integrating both integrals.

8)

what is duration of 10 year zero coupon bond?

what is duration of portfolio of 70% 10 year zero coupon bond and 30% 20 year zero coupon bond?

9)

in fixed income, what is convexity?

10)

write a recursive function.

11)

write a program that does the following (in compilable c++ code):

the input is a number. return true if the number has any number of consecutive numbers that add up to it (for example 5 would return true because 2+3, consecutive numbers, is 5. 4 would return false).

12)

write a program that calculates factorial with input n.

13)

what is dangling pointer?

14)

how to find the size of an 'int'? (integer object)

15)

write a program (pseudocode, thank GOD) that does the following:

take a string and reverses it (thanks mike gao)

16)

what is mortgage back security?

17)

what are chances that of 1000 flipped coins, 600 of them are heads?

18)

what does US government have influence over the mortgage backed securities? and for blackrock's clients?

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other questions

1)

why family guy over simpsons and king of the hill?

2)

capital markets or computer science?

(i had the fudge this answer, of course.)

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i think thats it. such an intense superday. but finally glad that its over!

andy

michael lewis weighs in

i came across this op ed piece by our beloved michael lewis (author of 'liar's poker') and it talks about wall street careers and our dreams. since i know a lot of people struggling with this, in times of recruiting and financial crisis, i highly suggest everyone to take a look. the last paragraph is gold and for people who don't know what they are doing and doing it because nyu stern tells them to then take his advice.

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A Wall Street Job Can’t Match a Calling in Life: Michael Lewis

Commentary by Michael Lewis

Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Recently I received a letter from a young employee of a well-known financial firm, who asked that I not mention his full name, his employer or anything else that might give him away. Though a bit short on self-pity and self- dramatization, this letter was otherwise a fine example of a sort I’ve received often these past few months.

“I am writing you for advice,” Anthony (let us call him) began. “I graduated in May of 2008 and since July have spent my time entangled in the culture of (his well-known New York bank). I’m thinking about leaving. My dad labored his whole life so I could have the opportunity to do something like this, so leaving isn’t exactly what I want to do. I know if I stay here I could work unbelievably hard and move through the ranks, or maybe move firms… (but) I guess I’m starting to question the whole securities industry.”

The young man went on to concede that what attracted him to Wall Street was the chance to get rich quickly, and the excitement -- but that both of these things now seem gone forever.

“So I have this plan to go to Hollywood,” he wrote, but then instantly undermined himself. “I feel confused, a little stupid, but yet somewhat confident. I mean, I read your book, I figured out how to get to Wall Street from a non-Ivy League school, and I got here. The only question now is, if I leave, where do I go?”

Let me try to help sort it out:

Dear Anthony, On several occasions I have taken my own advice and it has almost killed me, and so I’m a tad uneasy about offering it up to you. But if you promise not to take it any more seriously than I do, I’ll answer you as best I can.

Let’s start by putting your problem into perspective: You still have a job. You work at one of the world’s biggest banks. It’s true: The thrill and money is rapidly being drained from such places. Your big bank, like all the other big banks, seems to be in the process of being nationalized -- thus the longer you stay the more you may find yourself in something resembling a government job. But that’s not all bad: Government jobs are secure. You are also young, in your early 20s, and without a family to support. That is, unlike the vast majority of the people on and off Wall Street, you have the luxury to wallow in your misfortune. Now let’s wallow. We’re at the beginning of a recalibration of the role of finance in global economic life. The excitement and the money that attracted you to Wall Street will probably not return for a long time. If these really are the only reasons you became a financier you probably should find something else to do with your life.

Hollywood Lurch

But before you go lurching into Hollywood let us make sure you aren’t simply repeating the mistake you made by lurching onto Wall Street. That is, let us focus less on your immediate condition -- safely employed but disillusioned -- to the habits and beliefs that led you into it. You were never exactly wrong. If you’d been born 10 years earlier and behaved exactly as you have done, your career might well have made you as rich and seemingly successful as you imagined your father wanted you to be. You simply came to Wall Street too late, and are in the strange position of a man who won the lottery on the first day there was nothing in the pot. The mistake you made, in your view, is to have played the lottery on the wrong day. The mistake you made, in mine, was to have played the lottery at all. There’s a question you might ask yourself: Am I looking for a job, or a calling? On the one hand the importance you attach to your career suggests a desire for a calling; on the other, your instinct to abandon your chosen career the moment it ceases to offer an easy path to fame and fortune, suggests that what you’re really in the market for is a job.

Job vs. Calling

The distinction is artificial but worth drawing. A job will never satisfy you all by itself, but it will afford you security and the chance to pursue an exciting and fulfilling life outside of your work. A calling is an activity you find so compelling that you wind up organizing your entire self around it -- often to the detriment of your life outside of it. There’s no shame in either. Each has costs and benefits. There is no reason to make a fetish of your career. There are activities other than work in which to find meaning and pleasure and even a sense of self-importance -- you just need to learn how to look. Reading between the lines of your letter I sense that some of your anxiety is caused by your desire for the benefits of each -- job and calling -- without the costs. Perhaps that is what led you to Wall Street in the first place, and why your mind now turns to Hollywood.

Doing Well

What Wall Street did so well, for so long, was to give people jobs that they could pass off to themselves as well as others as callings. Such was their exalted social and financial status: Wall Street jobs made people feel special without actually having to be special. You never really had to explain why you were doing it -- even if you should have. But really, the same rule that applies to properly functioning financial markets applies to other markets: There’s a direct relationship between risk and reward. A fantastically rewarding career usually requires you to take fantastic risks. To get your seat at the table on Wall Street you may have passed through a fine filter, but you took no real risk. You were just being paid, briefly, as if you had. So which is it: job or calling? You can answer the question directly, or allow time to answer it for you. Either way, I think you’d be happier if you stopped thinking of what the world had to offer you, and started thinking a bit more about what you had to offer the world. Real excitement isn’t just in whatever you happen to be doing, but in what you bring to it.

In the end, you have to look for it not on the outside, but on the inside. In my experience, if you find it, the other stuff will take care of itself.

Michael Lewis

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andy

interviewing skills 101

interviewing preparation is a key element of success in leaving your best impression upon the firm and the interviewer. for any given question, an appropriate response should be prepared and practiced so your tone and flow are genuine. since interviewers go through many candidates at a time, try to make your response unique: make your answer reflect your own personality and character and use stories and concrete examples that are true.

here are some common interview questions:


tell me about yourself.

my name is andy jiang, i'm 5'8'', 140lbs, blood type O, shoe size 10 american. i love runny egg yolk, hot sauce, and pulpy orange juice.


have you done any trading previously?

yes, i have bought and redistributed marijuana, adderall, and shrooms, and am fairly familiar with those markets in the new england area. i began my career in the drug market by specializing in high end marijuana markets doing individual sales to clients. as i became more familiar with the marijuana market, i moved towards sales between businesses, and ultimately began trading weight and focused on increasing trade volume. i focused on arbitrage opportunities and compared prices of different strains in different locations to determine any openings in the market. at the same time, i was constantly looking for investors and speculators who were interested in participating in the market. marijuana and adderall are highly liquid market (except during the end of college semesters for weed and during exams for adderall), whereas shrooms is highly illiquid market.


what makes you the best candidate for this position?

i was born with a keyboard in my hands. since the moment i was able to process sight, i was using microsoft excel. i have logged over 5000 hours ONLY doing control-c, control-v (my total logged hours for all excel functions exceed 8 years). i have wet dreams about spreadsheets and the little microsoft paper clip helper guy, only to wake up at the crack of dawn to pull open excel and start copying and pasting. there is no task imaginable that is more intellectually stimulating than repeat control c, control v. when i do not have the pleasure of sitting in front of a computer, i have a fake keyboard that i practice excel hot keys with, to keep my mind sharp.


remember to be honest and genuine while answering each question. practice in front of a mirror to help solidify your physical impression.


more to come later..

andy

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the information presented in this entry is all false.

LOLstern

this was pretty well received in the facebook community so i thought i would share with the three people who read this blog.

andy