twenty-five years younger than the grandfatherly head of sales, and keen to make his mark, so I would have to be on my guard.
Chopping non revenue earners is an easy way of demonstrating corporate machismo, even if it is at the expense of the long term.
Keep a low profile, draw that fat salary and survive was my philosophy. A Little, Oscillating Dick, as opposed to a Big Swinging one.
Chapter 4
At the end of the week it was amazing how tired I’d get, given how little I had actually exerted myself. All stockbrokers believe they do a hard, stressful job and therefore justify the pay they earn. There is no doubt that a certain amount of discipline is required, to get in at 7.45 and survive until 5.30, and read the FT, which would be the world’s dullest newspaper if the Wall Street Journal were not duller. But it doesn’t take long to read the three articles a day in it which are relevant to you. I doubt that more than two per cent of brokers or fund managers ever read the editorial. Meanwhile it costs more than any of the other broadsheets. The Daily Telegraph sports section alone gives better value for money.
Some people do work long hours in the City, but usually as a result of some staying-on-at-work competition instigated by those with more ambition than sense. Very few jobs in the City require you ever to have two telephones strapped to the ears à la financial soap, and the infrequent bursts of frenetic activity are interspersed with very long periods of profound tedium, sometimes, no, often, lasting weeks on end.
Stockbrokers do not have stressful lives, and it is easy for incompetent people to avoid being fired. It is sometimes said that we deserve our high pay because we burn out early like soccer stars. This argument is entirely specious. If it is true it is because champagne is bad for you. As for the high pay being compensation for low job security, I fail to identify a correlation between low pay and high security. Somewhat the reverse in fact.
I guess that getting up at 6.30 every day does take its toll, but the only stress generated comes from trying to work up enthusiasm for the machinations of the Bundesbank or the business prospects of some Swedish rock tool manufacturer day in day out. The compensatory buzz of dealing in huge sums of money and calculating the percentage that would accrue to my bonus was not one that I often had.
Weekends were spent recovering from the Bundesbank or the rock tool manufacturer. It’s a shame to waste one’s precious days off, but usually I achieved nothing beyond a bit of shopping. Rika would give me inviolable instructions to dust mantelpieces, change sheets, wash them, hoover upstairs, put the rubbish out, clean the stove, buy some new shoes for Gen and other exciting leisure time activities. I violated them, I rebelled, I did nothing.
On Sundays, if nothing had been organised, Gen and I would nip round the corner to the local car boot sale to marvel at the array of merchandise on offer; most of which would be thrown away by Oxfam. I always came back at least a fiver poorer to the despair of Rika, who had a tendency to be less optimistic about the investment potential of my restoration projects.
With the junk we bought, Gen could recreate the road to Basra on News at Ten or, by the imaginative removal of tyres from toy cars and juxtaposition of Lego, an authentic Camberwell street scene. The fact that he possessed only broken toys made trips to his friend Rory’s house, with all its expensive kit from the Early Learning Centre, all the more exciting for him. Rory was a poisonous child, but because our toys didn’t come up to scratch we rarely had to reciprocate hospitality. This isn’t quite fair. Rory very much liked Gen’s broken toys, but Rory’s parents, being pushy, wanted him to Learn things Early. It really is a very clever name for a toy shop. You can’t help wishing a child with dyslexia on parents like Rory’s. They were also very keen for Rory to grow up as liberal on the subject of race as they were. Gen, being of yellowish hue, was a gentle initiation before exposure to the really hard stuff.
The tyranny of the Sunday papers was one of the worst things about being a stockbroker. It was dismal to have to plough through all that dreary journalism on company results and contracts on one’s day off on the vague chance that a journalist had come up with something that we didn’t know or fabricate a week ago.
I cycled in to work. In the world of the company GTI this marked me out as eccentric, but I did it because it was the only regular exercise I got, and public transport was so hopeless, and even on my wages I baulked at the cost of parking in the City. My colleagues Charlie and Henry shared a car in from near Camberwell, but that meant getting to Charlie’s house by 7 a.m. which was about half an hour too early for me, (or two and a half hours of lost sleep a week).
I kept three suit jackets on the back of my chair and the adjoining trousers in my European equities research filing cabinet, somewhere between Chemicals and Consumer Goods. This was necessary to avoid the tiresome ritual of having them hidden from me each day by Charlie; proof, perhaps, that the British are not necessarily endowed with a more sophisticated sense of humour than the Japanese.
At 7.30 a.m. there were few people about other than my colleagues, mainly ex-Army officers, so rather than walk all the way to the gents I always changed in the middle of the room.
In the morning meeting we learnt that L’Oreal might take over Revlon, that there were some important employment numbers coming up from the United States on Friday, and that Heineken’s earnings per share were up, as expected, by 12.3 per cent. Ericsson had won a small order from Kuwait to help rebuild its cellular phone network. And that was it.
Alick, our chief and mentor, ex-Guardsman, Old Etonian, therefore spent the morning writing a militaristic memo to New York demanding that the lazier analysts (nine out of twelve) be sacked. They were in a different league from the analysts at Phillips and Drew in terms of their industry, knowledge and experience, but Alick did have a point that some were lazy. The nice grandmother from the Bronx with the sexy anklet had let them become very “un-American” in their working habits.
To the New York head office, the European equities sales team (only four of us) was just a pimple on the backside of Merrill Lynch, and Alick its suppurating centre, so this memo was unlikely to have more effect than the previous twenty-five.
Meanwhile, Henry, ex-Guardsman, wife’s brother went to Eton, went round to the research department to photocopy the Telegraph crossword. He had been a more sybaritic, officers’ mess kind of soldier than Alick. He definitely hadn’t answered a ‘Join the Professionals’ ad. On days like this he would do about half of the puzzle, then ring up clients and flatter them by asking their advice on the clues he couldn’t do. This way of carrying on drove Alick spare, but so long as a large order from one of the flattered clients arrived once a fortnight or so, there was not a great deal he could do about it.
Charlie, very minor public school, Dad in the RAF, straight into the City, children will certainly go to Eton, (if they are bright enough to get in) was at twenty-five the youngest team member. He got directly on to the phone and didn’t get off it until he had told all his clients about the Kuwaiti phone order and Heineken’s e.p.s., even though all this mundane information was freely available on the Reuters screen. My three colleagues had all come from Swiss Bank Corp, then the Number One in Euro equities, where Charlie had been the most successful of them. His ‘This is the News’ service was important to fund managers because they needed to know what SBC were up to. The sad fact was that no European fund manager needed to know what Merrill Lynch was doing, so Charlie’s commission figures had slipped somewhat. They were still, however, in a different league from mine, but then I was Building-For-The-Long-Term.
(Self: can’t quite bring myself to admit minor public school, but it was a shock when I left to discover that most people haven’t heard of it. Famous old boy: John McCarthy. I can’t remember him at all, although my older brother, a senior prefect, claims to have busted him for smoking.)
Things brightened considerably with the arrival of a new trainee, a lovely Italian girl. She wore a contour-enhancing dress, a sculpted masterpiece of Milanese haute couture, with a zip all the way down the back, which somehow seemed to say, ‘undo me’.
She introduced herself. ‘I am juicy,’ she said. I, and several others, tried not to gasp too visibly.
‘You’re