‘I want to tell you a story.’ Caleb’s face loomed over the table. ‘I used to know a really good trader. Smart guy. Young. Just like you. But he had one serious problem – he thought he could walk away.’
I felt my stomach sink. We were in a corporate restaurant in a skyscraper in Tokyo, bowls of ramen between us, only I couldn’t eat a thing. ‘Anyway this guy decided he was going to take the money and leave the industry. Sweet.
‘But he didn’t understand how it works. They went back and looked at all of his trades, his chat history, managed to find some stuff he shouldn’t have done.’
I could feel fire in my legs now. A burning. But I didn’t move. ‘They took that trader to court. He hadn’t really done anything that bad but they put something together. The case rumbled on for years. Never got to leave. Just courtrooms. Best years of his life…’
My boss’s face loomed closer still. ‘Gary. I like you. But we can make life very difficult for you.’
So, the plot is, plucky little scrote with vast talent for trading. Makes it in the Big City. Then wants to leave – at which point his boos blackmails him into remaining a trader.
The moment you even indicate that you’re thinking of changing trading desk, let alone leaving the trade, you’re cut off from the phones, the email, your desk, everything. You don’t even get to go back to your desk to retrieve the piccies of your dog – those are collected and handed to you in a black plastic bag.
Because if you’re about to jump ship then no one will still trust you with tens to hundreds of millions of the bank’s trading capital.
Quitting is brutally easy precisely because they don’t want anyone who doesn’t want to be there.
So, my view is that everything else being said in this new revelatory book is also toss.
So the bloke finds it easier to write a whinging book about it all.
But I’ve got to concede that I’m a lazy bastard, just like him.
With an eye to book sales and film rights in the fiction category.
As I’ve said before, looking back I realised that I got some kid-glove treatment in my last job because colleagues had somehow persuaded themselves that I was well off and would greet any buggeration with a firm “get stuffed; I’m off!”.
Mind you a colleague had done something like that earlier: inherited a tidy sum and within a couple of years looked at another fucking form to be completed and simply resigned.
A long time ago I played golf with a guy whose wife had been a senior trader. When she indicated she was leaving that happened to her and they enforced the 12 month non compete clause by putting her on gardening leave. They were having a whale of a time.
“The moment you even indicate that you’re thinking of changing trading desk, let alone leaving the trade, you’re cut off from the phones, the email, your desk, everything. You don’t even get to go back to your desk to retrieve the piccies of your dog – those are collected and handed to you in a black plastic bag.”
Having worked in the broking/IB industry I can confirm this. You’re walked out the door unless you’re changing industries.
Here in OZ, gardening leave is the term used for this situation.
Caleb sounds an unlikely moniker for Don Corleone or Tony Soprano.
This guy has a YT channel ostensibly explaining economics, which i came across a couple of years ago. He trades alot off of being a city boi but now claims his mettier is explaining why everyone is getting screwed by banks and big corp.
found it… gary stephenson. Same guy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZHdXOWMChE