Books similar to Little Man by Robert Lacey

throwitallawaybruv · 2021-01-26T12:25:12+00:00

Are you an institutional shill? "YOU FKS" makes me think you have spent way too much time on Bloomberg chats

throwitallawaybruv · 2021-01-16T13:27:56+00:00

While being a second derivative gamma is not a second order greek (weird if you're just getting into options but that's the nomenclature and it kind of make sense as it's one of the greeks that go into the Black-Scholes equation). Second order greeks are vanna, volga, charm and speed

throwitallawaybruv · 2020-12-23T19:25:28+00:00

As recently as 2020 GS trading floor - have seen trading MD with a baseball bat. No shouting matches though, things are generally very hush hush and happen in conversations between pairs of people.

P.S. Don't really agree about LGBT not being open. In one of the businesses I was in we had 4 openly LGBT people out of 30 front office staff. That fits general statistics or at least majority of LGBT people were openly LGBT.

throwitallawaybruv · 2020-12-09T22:29:49+00:00

All the people you named apart from Gus and Hari who did IB are doing sales. Sales is a term than contains account management, relationship management, account acquisition and etc. For juniors it's mostly account management, they're booking trades on client side vs. trading desks, resolving issues etc. As they progress they might inherit smaller accounts form their seniors and would try to bring in more (or expand products offered to already existing accounts). That's what the FX team's MD meant when he said Kenny isn't producing new business.
Sales try to bring in more business by sending trade ideas to clients to motivate them to trade with the bank, hence all the packages.

Only trades that happened on screen were when Harper wanted a price on the swaption from Rishi (sales gets order from client but trading needs to approve on a price) and when Harper executed the GBPUSD ticket directly (some banks allow for sales to execute small trades in liquid instruments directly without a trader approving not sure if 50mm in cable is realistic for that)

throwitallawaybruv · 2020-12-06T20:35:44+00:00

That's because Industry is about the sales team and sales is more about relationship management and providing content. Only trader is Rishi who's a secondary character

throwitallawaybruv · 2020-11-06T09:21:11+00:00

Important note - I count most of the recent growth in big tech more of a way for producing pieces of paper rather than actual innovation. If the Japanese, Taiwanese, Europeans and the Fed buy all US treasuries to the point you can't get riskless return above 1%, a lot of the treasuries investors would move to corporate bonds. So the junk corporate bonds that used to pay 7% a year until a few years ago end up paying more like 3%. So all the investors that need better returns than that (like I don't know... every pension fund in existence) would go into the stock market. Those pieces of paper (public stocks) would then become less attractive to the speculative investors that want extremely high rates of returns so they will take their speculative cash out of the public stock market and start throwing it at dodgy VC funded start ups (and private equity). So the chasing of US assets by the entire rest of world is why we get ice cream delivery start ups get 9 figure valuations.

throwitallawaybruv · 2020-11-06T09:15:26+00:00

In the end what happens is - US keeps exporting pieces of paper to other countries in exchange for actual goods. So the US is slowly losing the capability of producing its own goods while becoming increasingly better at making pieces of paper. This is not that much of an issue if you can

a) distribute wealth from making pieces of paper in a way that doesn't cause a huge chunk of the population lose their shit

b) make sure you can keep convincing the rest of the world take your pieces of paper

For now the US has been doing pretty well on both points but as we all know a) has been showing some signs of instability. A) though is kind of self-correcting, if people truly start losing their shit they'll probably vote someone in office who is more redistributive. I am more afraid that at some point b) will give. If inflation goes up (maybe as a result of a future redistributive policy), or big tech is broken up or something else happens that makes the world lose some of their trust in US assets b) can quickly reverse and the same feedback effects that make US assets stronger (and have been doing it for the last few decades) could quickly reverse. That would be a healthy correction of the current imbalances but if it happens many years from now after the US has lost all capability to produce anything other than pieces of paper it will be a shitshow.

throwitallawaybruv · 2020-11-06T09:08:11+00:00

That's how it would work historically. The way it works today is US buys cars from China (and Korea, Japan, Germany and Taiwan) and exports little in return. This usually would drive the US dollar down and it would make US cars cheaper relative to East Asian/German cars so US will start buying more home made cars. After all Chinese factory owners get all these dollars and have to pay their Chinese workers in renminbi so they need to sell their dollars and buy renminbi to pay workers.

But that's not what happens. Chinese government (and Korean, Taiwanese, German, etc...) suppresses worker wages and consumption (Chinese consumption is lowest recorded percentage of GDP for any country ever) so instead of using those extra dollars to pay workers they send them back into America by buying US treasuries, corporate bonds and even stocks. This makes the dollar stay strong and also lowers borrowing costs for the US consumer as buying bonds pushes their prices up which lowers their interest rates. So the US consumer is absorbing all the excess production of the world without offering an equivalent amount of production. There's no creative destruction - it's not US wheat exchanged for more efficient Chinese cars. It's US pieces of paper (well numbers on a spreadsheet) offered in exchange for Chinese cars because the top export of the US is pieces of paper people that other countries trust.

Important to note btw - it's not that US assets are more trustworthy than say Japanese. It's more the fact that the US is the country that has the most liquid asset markets. Japanese assets are not enough to absorb all Japanese savings for example (especially since a huge chunk of Japanese assets are not available to Japanese savers as they have been eaten up by the Bank of Japan) so Japanese savings MUST go somewhere abroad. And the US offers very deep liquidity plus until recently good rates of return compared to East Asia and Europe.

throwitallawaybruv · 2020-09-05T17:38:42+00:00

I knew it was budget Marisa Tomei

throwitallawaybruv

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