The purpose of this blog is to provide thoughtful analysis. Regular readers will also be aware that we use this site as an outlet for our own opinions – opinions that may look out of place in a regular piece of journalism. For the next week, however, this site will be a true home of creativity.
The world of cut throat finance has given birth to a number of memorable characters from Patrick Bateman to Gordon Gecko. Now, a new anthology, titled Wall Street Noir, promises to bring a few more financial characters to life.
Below we start our serialisation of At The Top of His Game – one of the short stories in the anthology – which happens to be written by none other than Structured Products Association chairman Keith Styrcula (under the nom de plume Stephen Rhodes).
The anthology is edited by Peter Spiegelman - the Shamus Award-winning author of Black Maps (Knopf, 2003), Death's Little Helpers (Knopf, 2005), and Red Cat (Knopf, 2007), which feature private detective and Wall Street refugee John March. Spiegelman is a twenty-year veteran of the financial services and software industries, and has worked with banks, brokerage houses, and central banks in major markets around the world.
Details of the anthology can be found here.
And I sincerely hope your co-head, or any other colleague, isn’t quite as ruthless as Ranieri.
Enjoy…
At The Top of His Game
By Stephen Rhodes
ON THE DAY THEY CONSPIRE TO PUT A BULLET IN MY HEAD, I experience an epiphany.
My epiphany is this: perhaps it's some law of nature, but once you're at the top of your game, everyone becomes your enemy. Rivals, friends, lawyers, lovers, superiors, subordinates – every last one of them. They plot and scheme and come after everything that matters to you, everything you love and care about.
Maybe it’s the Darwinian nature of the Street itself. A fourteen-year career in finance wears away at your soul, as assuredly as a stream against limestone. It pushes you to a place where you don't fully recognize who you are, or how you got here. Everyone around you becomes a stranger, including—no, especially— your own wife. Working sixteen-hour days in those glistening glass towers in Manhattan, engaging in mortal combat with some of the planet's brightest and most power-obsessed who have trained their full concentration on destroying you and stealing the business you've built up over the years — well, it hardens you. Wall Street eats its young, and today the beast has a particular appetite for a certain thirty-six-year-old maverick with seventy-eight people reporting to him (which would be me).
So today they plan to execute me. How do I know this? Well, last night at 9:30 p.m., an urgent BlackBerry message instructed me to report to Howard Ranieri's office at 7:30 a.m. sharp for a mandatory meeting. That e-mail was no surprise; a head's-up had come from a friend in HR that my employment would be terminated during this impromptu meeting.
My response? Bring it on. Bring it on.
◙ ◙ ◙
Ranieri is now more than forty minutes late for his own meeting. Typical move for this passive-aggressive, hair-challenged, no-talent clown. I should mention that Ranieri is my co-head in the Equity Structured Products group.
Outside Ranieri's office, the phones on the trading floor twitter relentlessly. This morning, Goldman Sachs has issued a dire report on certain Latin American economies. As a result, the overseas financial markets are getting walloped.
The twentysomething stress addicts that populate the trading floor gaze into their Bloomberg screens seeking divine guidance. I hear the voices of my people reporting losses in the overseas markets like breathless wartime correspondents witnessing heavy casualties from the front lines. The Footsie is getting whacked, hammered, slammed, smashed, crushed, drilled, smoked, spanked, roasted, sewered, bashed. Boom boom, out go the lights.
Ranieri's tardiness is driving me to distraction. It's Friday. I've got a dinner party at the Honeywells' tonight. And I've got a wife who may have been cheating with a kickboxing instructor. Do I really need to have Ranieri playing with my head in the moments before he gleefully fires me?
Abruptly, Howie breezes through the door of his office. "Sparky, glad to see you're here," he burbles as if he's five minutes late for a tennis game. "I'm really truly sorry about this, but—"
"No, you're not."
"Come again?"
I pronounce each syllable slowly. "I said, 'No, you're not.' Meaning, no, you are not sorry. You are the polar opposite of sorry. You kept me waiting on purpose."
"Touche, Sparky." Ranieri's laugh is a brutish grunt. "Maybe you're kind of right about that."
"Not a problem. I passed the time by reading all your e-mails."
Ranieri inspects me to see whether I'm serious, but my poker face is inscrutable.
"Anyhoo," Ranieri says with narrowed eyes, "let's move on to the reason we're here. You know Brian, I presume."
I turn around and see Brian Morgan, a VP from HR, skulking in the doorway, craving invisibility. Brian is a good guy in my book; he was the one who gave me the head's-up about this meeting. I take note of the thick Redweld tucked under his arm—my personnel file, no doubt.
"Um, good morning, Mark." He winces as he says this. It's obvious this is anything but.
"Of course I know Brian," I say breezily. "We've worked together for what ... six years?"
"Yeah, six years," he confirms.
"Six long years recruiting the best structured products group on the Street, from the ground up."
More to follow tomorrow…
To pre-order Wall Street Noir click here.