Bond Girl (4 page)

Pork belly futures? I thought I was working on the Treasury bond desk. What do pigs have to do with anything?

“I don't know what's going on lately with some firms allowing their analysts to fail the tests and still keep their jobs while they study for a second try, but that's not how we do things here. You pass all of them on the first try in October or you're fired.”

Great.

“As you know, we are business casual here. I trust that you'll dress appropriately. If you wear a tight skirt and someone smacks your ass, don't come running to me or to HR about it. This is a place of business. Not a nightclub. The team is fantastic, one of the best in the Business. They work hard, play hard, and are some of the funniest human beings you will ever meet in your life. Personally, I think being a little crazy is what makes us so good at what we do, so prepare yourself for just about anything. It may seem like a tough group to crack, but once you earn their respect and are accepted, there's no better group of people to work with.”

Yeah, especially if they smack me on the ass.

“Other than that, keep your head down, work hard, and stay out of the way. Use your brain, and you'll be fine. Are we clear?” He finally took his feet off the desk and turned his gaze on me.

“Yes, Chick. We're clear.”

“One more thing. I'm not your father, and I really don't give a fuck what you do with your personal life, but I don't encourage interoffice relationships. You're a good-looking girl, and it won't surprise me if half the floor hits on you, but I expect you to be smart. I do
not
expect you to date anyone on this floor, certainly not anyone on
my
desk. The last thing I need is a weepy employee fucking up right and left because she's upset that someone here didn't return a phone call. Capiche? Let's go.”

Chick stood without giving me a chance to answer. I had never in my life met anyone who seemed so nice and so completely insane at the same time.

We walked out onto the floor, a giant room shaped like a horseshoe with enormous hermetically sealed windows and ceilings high enough to accommodate a circus tent. I wasn't expecting the floor to look the way it did. Every time I'd gone to work with my father, I had never stepped foot on a trading floor. Bankers were kept separate from everyone else. They had inside information on mergers, stock offerings, and acquisitions and had to be segregated from the traders to ensure that inside information stayed classified. Banking floors were clean and tidy—all polished wood, plush carpets, and private offices. They even used a different elevator bank. The stories my dad had told me about my new work environment didn't begin to do it justice. The difference between the Cromwell Pierce trading floor and the Sterling Price banking floor was staggering. This place looked like it was stuck in the '70s. The walls had probably been white once upon a time, but they were now a dingy shade of cream. The Formica desks were chipped and stained, broken corners revealing the brown cork underneath. The fact that these desks were basically Generation One Cromwell was something I tried not to focus on; because if I thought about how many people had sneezed, coughed, eaten, and God knows what else all over them for the last forty years, I would have to come to work in a plastic jumpsuit wearing latex gloves.

I kept my eyes on the floor as I navigated the obstacle course of rows to our “desk” in the back corner of the room. I could feel the stares from the men as I walked by. The guys surveyed the length of my skirt and the fit of my sweater, just in case I had missed a button or, God forbid, had visible panty lines. It was something I'd have to get used to.

The energy in the room was palpable. People bellowed out numbers, screamed instructions to pick up phones, yelled just for the sake of yelling. The shouting made my ears buzz, and I didn't know how anyone was able to understand anything above the chaos. There were at least four hundred people on the Cromwell Pierce fixed-income trading floor. Most of them were loud. Most of them were aggressive. Most of them relished the opportunity to mess with the new kids.

Most of them were male.

Chick suddenly threw his hand up in front of my head and intercepted a football that had missed its intended target. Unless of course, the target was me.

“Watch it, Smitty! Hitting the new girl in the face with a football on her first day will get you called to the principal's office.”

I tried to find something to say to break the awkward silence, and the best I could come up with was, “You guys play football?”

“Sometimes
we
do.
You
don't. You'll be too busy learning to have time to play. Capiche?”

“Sure. I'm really excited to be here and I'm ready to work hard.”

“That's good, Alex, because we don't want you here any other way.”

A slight, pale man with red hair and an absurdly thin blond girl approached us. They stopped, and the guy nodded in my direction. His skin was translucent and his eyes so light they were almost clear. I was immediately reminded of the weakling on the high school football team who had to carry the equipment because he wasn't big enough to actually play in the games. I had always assumed those scrawny kids bulked up later in life. I was wrong.

“Who's this?” he asked, his voice almost robotic.

“Alex. My new kid,” Chick answered curtly.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi!” The blond stick figure gushed, as she threw herself on me. “Oh, this is great! I'll have a friend now! There aren't a lot of girls to talk to in this place!” she said as she hugged me.

The redheaded leprechaun surveyed me and said, “Chick, yours is cute, but mine is better.” He snorted as he walked away, the girl trotting off quickly behind him. I wondered if he took the train to work, or if he just slid down a rainbow into the lobby.

I held my breath. Chick started walking again and said, “That was Keith Georgalis, more commonly known on the floor as Darth Vader. He's a prick. He runs the high-yield desk. His sidekick is his analyst, Hannah. She's a freaking moron, but she's a treat to look at so we keep her. She doesn't work for me, so what do I care? If you make even half the mistakes that idiot has made, I'll bounce you out on your ass so fast your head will spin.”

Before I could say a word Chick stopped in front of a group of people and waved his arm in a sweeping motion as he proudly announced, “This is the desk.”

A “desk” was the Wall Street term for the team of people who worked in a specific product area. My desk, the government bond sales desk, was composed of forty people sitting in three long rows like diner counters—covered with papers, phones, and flat screen monitors. Each person sat in an aerodynamic chair, his specific workspace segregated from the person sitting next to him only by a thin black line of grout, the same way tiles are connected on a bathroom floor. The workstations were so close together that if you extended both your arms you would touch your neighbors. The concept of “personal space” didn't seem to exist here, and I realized that if I ended up sitting next to an asshole—or worse, in between two—my days were going to be miserable.

I stared at the wall of computer monitors looming in front of everyone. Every single employee on the floor had at least three monitors at his workstation. Some traders had as many as six. In order to view them all, some were elevated above others on stacked reams of printer paper. It was hard to believe that there was enough information to look at on a daily basis to warrant multiple computer monitors, and I quickly began to worry that I wasn't going to be able to follow everything the way the other guys could. At the time I didn't realize that someone could sit directly behind you and you could be so busy you'd go months without ever actually speaking to that person, or even know his name. You could. I would.

I was nervous, adrenaline making me so jittery it was hard to stand still. I scanned the men sitting in the rows. They were all on their phones, some of them with their feet up, mindlessly tossing small rubber balls into the air while they spoke. The phones rang incessantly, multicolored lights blinking on an enormous switchboard. The desk was covered with coffee cups, soda cans, bottles of water, and newspapers. The place smelled like the short-order cook station at a diner—a combination of grease, sweat, strong coffee, and burned bacon. I gave a quick glance around and saw a huge box filled with bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches lying on the floor. As I scanned the group, I noticed the one other woman on the desk. I made a mental note to introduce myself to her sooner rather than later.

Chick grabbed my shoulders and began to turn me in ten-degree clips as he pointed to other long counterlike rows filled with people conducting business. “Here's a brief layout of the floor.” He spun me to the left and pointed to a square configuration in the corner of the room. “That's the emerging markets desk. They sell bonds issued by developing countries. Brazil, Mexico, Chile. Most of Latin America.” He turned me another ten degrees so that I was facing the middle of the room. “Over to the left we have high yield, bonds issued by companies with lower credit ratings. That means the debt has a higher risk than say a high-grade bond, which is debt sold by larger, more well-established companies. Your Ford, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and most other big-name companies you can think of are traded off the high-grade desk, which sits directly to their left. Past them you have mortgages, which should be self-explanatory, and at the end of the room you have the money market team. They sell bonds that mature in one year or less. There's also some structured product teams over there,” he said as he rotated me again and pointed to a bunch of nerdy-looking guys in the right far corner. “They do highly complicated structured trades that most people don't understand, and that includes a majority of the people in this room. You'll learn what they do eventually, because I'm training you and I don't have idiots working for me. Finally, around the corner is the foreign exchange desk. They trade global currencies. If you ever travel to Europe and have to change your dollars for sterling or euros, you'll have to know where those rates are trading. That's their job. Capiche? There are economists and strategists scattered all over the place. You won't have much cause to interact with anyone who doesn't work in rates to start off.”

I tried to process everything he was saying, but my brain shut down somewhere around the time he mentioned Brazil. I was so screwed.

“Now, these rows over here,” he said as he pointed to long rows that faced each other, the elevated monitors forming a wall in between the guys so they didn't have to stare at each other all day, “is the trading desk. These guys actually price and trade the bonds that we, the sales desk, buy and sell for our clients. It's our job as salespeople to solicit business and keep our clients informed and happy. Clients can pick up the phone and call any shop on the street to do trades; we need to make sure that they call
us
. How do we do that? By being good fucking salespeople, that's how. That's what we are going to teach you. How to be a good fucking salesperson. Capiche?” My head was spinning, and I could swear that I just heard one of the trader's computers cluck like a chicken for no apparent reason.
What the hell was going on here?

“What's that noise?” I asked, afraid if I hadn't really just heard a clucking chicken I was about two minutes away from a stroke.

“What, the chicken?” he asked.

I was relieved he heard it, too, and yet startled that he didn't seem to think random barnyard animal noises needed explanation. I nodded. “Yes, the chicken.”

“Some of the traders programmed their systems to make farm animal noises when they do a trade. They can't possibly keep their eyes on everything all the time so the sound effects help let them know where their positions are. So don't be surprised when you hear something moo, or bark, or oink. The junior guy's system rings a cowbell, but it's annoying so I might make him change it. I hear that fucking thing in my sleep.”

Unless you saw it for yourself, you couldn't accurately imagine this scene if you took three tabs of acid and locked yourself in closet. I gulped.

“So are you ready to start?” Chick asked as he walked toward his chair on the desk, where he apparently spent most of his time, despite having a private office.

Ready to start?
I couldn't remember anything he just said. I needed a map. And a finance-to-English dictionary. Pronto.

Before I could ask him to clarify a few things, he called everyone to attention.

“Listen up, team; this is Alex. She's our new analyst. Introduce yourselves and make her feel at home.” A few people nodded; some of them raised their hands and waved. One guy actually got up and shook my hand, though he was on the phone when he did it so he didn't actually speak to me. I looked around and noticed that there were no empty workstations. I sure as hell wasn't going to sit on someone's lap, so I was sincerely hoping that Chick was going to tell me where I'd be sitting. When he sat down and started typing into a massive Excel sheet, I realized he wasn't.

I had no choice but to ask him, or else stand in the aisle all day like the team mascot.

“Excuse me, Chick. Where should I sit?” I asked, nervously.

“Here you go.” Without taking his eyes off his spreadsheet, he reached behind him and grabbed a tiny metal folding chair that was leaning against the wall. It was kindergarten size. I took the chair from him and held it in front of me without unfolding it, clearly confused.

“You don't have a desk yet,” he said, without trying to hide his irritation. “We have to figure out where to put you. In the meantime, just pull up the folding chair behind people and watch what they do. Rotate through the whole group.”