47. Kids' Excuse

47. Kids' Excuse

(6pm Friday Night)

VP: I need you to run these scenarios through the model and update the deck as of today’s market close for the meeting on Tuesday.

Analyst: Do you mind if I do it tomorrow? I was hoping to go to a friend’s birthday dinner at 7.

VP: No I need you to do it tonight. There will be plenty of birthdays.

Analyst: Yup, ok. Are we going to go through the deck again tonight?

VP: No can do, need to get home to the kids. We can go through it this weekend. Heading home now, thanks.

Typical VP and Directors, they are more than happy to neglect their kids most of the time, but when they ask you to stay late when it is completely unnecessary, they are the first ones to break out the kids excuse. “Oh yeah, I need to get to little…..um….Timmy’s….I mean Danny’s clarinet recital.” Really sir? I thought you had a girl? And since when do they have recitals on Friday nights? The same guy who just told me my personal life means shit is all of a sudden this great family man who can’t miss a recital. And by the way, you make a million dollars a year, how about you buy the kid a real instrument, like the bass.

Trust me, I would love to be able to use my kids as an excuse to leave but unfortunately I’m not even allowed to go out on a Friday night to meet a girl who I might have a kid with one day. They should making a dating website just for investment banking analysts. It would be similar to JDate, catering to a certain group of people. It would harken back to our middle school days where a “relationship” was seeing a girl in school and going out on a weekend once a month, but otherwise only really talking over AOL Instant Messanger. That sounds like a great way to move a relationship forward, at least it always worked in 8^th grade.

If you want to use your kids as an excuse for leaving me stranded on a Friday night, at least let it be known at other times that you do in fact have kids and a wife. It’s called being “personal” with your employees. I see you as a friggin drill sergeant who shouts orders at me and makes my life miserable. I may actually respect you and want to work harder for you if I think you are a good family man. Maybe replace your stupid deal toys on your shelves showing how much money you have helped bring in with some photos of your wife and kids and/or an ugly fire truck your kid drew, and I will begin to buy the story. Until that day, how about you let me enjoy my Friday night and just update your damn pitchbook that you don’t need for another 5 days at some point during the weekend. You’re not reviewing it on Friday night anyways, you’re busy at the recital!

46. Citigroup

46. Citigroup

$50 million corporate jet? $400 million stadium naming rights deal? Really, Citigroup? Really? For a company that would have completely folded, a la Lehman Brothers, Citigroup seems to still think it is the leading bank in the world. It took hundreds of columnists and TV anchors discussing the stupidity of buying a corporate jet when facing bankruptcy for Citigroup to realize the purchase might not be the wisest decision. Are the people there that dense? Learn to use the phone or teleconference. Let’s put this into an everyday context: Let’s say a friend of yours said he was going broke and if you didn’t help him out with a loan his family would starve as would other people who depend on him for employment and money. So because you are a do-gooder always looking out for others, you decide to lend him some money to help him and his dependents out during these tough times. You overhear this friend a week later talking about the Porsche he has his sights on and is going to buy that weekend. Now, would that make you very happy? Probablyyyyyyy not.

Maybe Vikram and crew figured $50 million would go unnoticed since they have been given so much and no one is going to comb through their every purchase. Fine, be naïve and think the government won’t check up on their investment. But when you are about to pay $400 million over 20 years to brand your name on a stadium for the New York Mets, I’m prettyyyyy sure the government will not miss that one. I understand that if you want to work your way back to profitability you are going to have to do some marketing to nab rich investors and other customers. But is the best usage of $20 million in marketing dollars each year to put your name on a stadium in Queens, New York? I think it might be a bit wiser to market on television and print, which is quite a bit cheaper and reaches a broader audience. Citi could have paid for about 7 Super Bowl commercials with that kind of dough. And they would have reached over a hundred million Americans, rather than the bums who are venturing to see New York’s second class franchise play in Queens. Also, this deal eerily reminds me of another great financial institution that decided to go the route of naming a stadium, a little company called Enron. I mean it worked out well for them, so why not? If you asked a group of individuals throughout the world which they think is more well-known, the New York Mets or Citigroup, my money is that Citi would win. The Mets are a second-tier franchise in baseball, whereas Citi has been one of the leading financial institutions for many years. I don’t think Citi needs to link themselves up with the Mets, unless they want to advertise to the world that they are a second-rate bank…

I know I am not the only way saying all of this, but I think of Citi like an alcoholic, the more time the alchy is told he has a problem, the more likely he is to seek help and stop the drinking. Citi is like a alcoholic, stoner, meth-head and glue sniffer all tied up in one. Get a clue Viky and either stop the excessive spending or find yourself a new company to run into the ground.

45. Recession

45. Recession

The past few months have been the equivalent of someone taking a nine-iron and taking swings at your head. Occasionally the club hits its mark and knocks your lights out, and the other times it missed and you throw the middle finger up at the swinger…who precedes to clock you the next time. Lehman? Buh-bye. Bear? Adios. WaMu? Mooove on out. And the list goes on. If you are one of the “lucky” analysts who has kept your job in i-banking, bravo! Despite the hellish hours being spent pitching companies on the idea of IPOs in this shit market, at least you’re still bringing in the big money. And for those of you left to suffer in the worst job market in decades, at least you don’t have to spend all of your waking hours going down on your 20 and 30-something year old associates. You can never try to find your passion, that job you always wanted, rather than the job you only learned about sophomore year in college when you realized that girls dig a guy with cash.

The one thing we can all agree on is this market royally sucks. That bonus from a month ago that you decided to put in stocks because the market had bottomed out? Yeah that’s probably dropped about 20%. Not looking so hot anymore. Plenty of people will tell you, “You’re young, in 5 years when the market is back to normal you’ll be making money.” Thanks for the advice numbnuts, but if I had hid that money under my pillow like any sane person I would still have the same amount of money, and not ¾ of it.

To continue the random tangents of this blog, I’d like to point out to everyone that it doesn’t matter if you’re an i-banker, mortgage broker, gas attendant or bum on the street, everyone has to take some blame for this shitshow. When everything was going well over the past few years, we were all profiting and no one was complaining. Joe NoMoney who couldn’t afford a home suddenly had a nice 3-bedroom in Connecticut that he was able to pay the mortgage for because he could just keep refinancing as his home went up in value. Sure you can blame the bank who decided to not check Joe’s credit history or anything and just give him an adjustable rate mortgage, but at the same time Joe should’ve thought to himself that eventually he’d have to PAY the mortgage payments. You could also blame the investment banks, the Government, and everyone’s favorite couple: Fannie and Freddie. Back in 1999 they decided they’d help out the common folk and buy up this Subprime mortgages ignoring what could happen if housing prices stopped rising, because why would that ever happen…

Link to article about Fannie and Freddie in 1999:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0DE7DB153EF933A0575AC0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

Hilarious explanation of the Subprime crisis:
http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true&pli=1

So while most Americans blame the government for not bailing out the banks right now and have tighter regulation, I say to hell with everyone. These are the same people who during the boom times feel the government should stay out of everyone’s business and let free market principal’s rule. Well if you want the government to let the market figure itself out in the good times, then you must suffer the bad times when people get too loose in their actions and forget about moral hazard. I know it’s awful and I wish the government would come in with the quick fix, but a lot of these companies deserve to fail for giving mortgages to people with no money and who produced no documents. Every sector suffers because of the decisions of the financial sector to produce these risky mortgages that were so profitable for a time. It’s an awful thing, but if we do not want to all suffer like this we’d have to give up the free rein we’ve had for so long and give in to some government regulation. I am all for the regulation, but I just hate that once things get going well again, people will brush off the government and begin begging the government to take off the restraints and let the market roar once again with morals pushed aside.

Good luck to everyone during this tough times.

44. Procrastination

44. Procrastination

Investment banking analysts may be at the office 24/7, but that doesn’t mean we are working the whole time. While there may be enough to do so, even us elite minds cannot concentrate for 15 minutes straight unless one of our bosses is standing right behind us….shit, sorry sir, back to work…Anyways, like everyone we have the need for speed (the drug not velocity) and also the need to procrastinate, which is why I am typing this entry right now. I have discussed a few ways that analysts procrastinate in other entries of this blog, including Brickbreaker and reading blogs, but these are only the tip of the iceberg my friend. If one wants to become a true analyst master of looking like you are working while you are actually perusing job sites, there are a few things to know, and a few better procrastination tools.

The first thing to know is “Alt + tab.” The combination of this simple keystroke combination, and an open excel model that someone else built in 2002, will make it easy to hide the movie you are watching when an associate or MD walks by your desk. Wouldn’t want them to see you watching “Mamma Mia!” on hulu.com or surfthechannel.com, when you are supposed to be building an LBO model for some pitchbook. For any halfwit analyst, using “Alt+tab” becomes a natural instinct whenever you hear footsteps or sense the presence of someone else.

Another brilliant procrastination tool was sent to me a while back that is a few games put into excel. These games includes mini golf and Pac Man (the game with the yellow guy, not the football player who makes it rain in strip clubs), and are simply the full games but pasted into an excel files. This allows you to use “Alt+tab’s” cousin “Ctrl + tab.” Using this nifty shortcut you can easily move to another spreadsheet you have open, so your associate will not have to wonder what your open Internet explorer window is that is hidden.

While I’m the kind of guy that procrastinates with the basic reads, including espn.com, cnn.com, nyt.com and the intellectual pagesix.com, some people aspire for better sites and procrastination activities. Some analysts like to read about themselves so they turn to blogs written by other analysts or dealbreaker.com. During layoffs and bonus time, Dealbreaker gives little updates called “Bonus Watch 2008” or “Layoff Watch 2008” where analysts can read about what bonuses are given at different banks and what level people are being canned at other banks and their own. If you are an ambitious analyst you can pull a great prank by emailing Dealbreaker and telling them that you heard that half of the analysts in your group are being fired, or that bonuses for analysts at your bank will be half of what they were last year. This will likely cause your fellow analysts to shit the bed and maybe even quit out of misery, which moves you up the bonus ladder. Very niiiiiiice!

43. Brickbreaker

43. Brickbreaker

In the past cell phone users have been consumed with great games such as Snake, which could keep us occupied for 15-30 minutes while we waited for someone or took a subway somewhere. As times changed and RIM brought us the Crackberry, so too have the games we played changed. Blackberry brought us the game of all games, Brickbreaker. As most of you know, Brickbreaker is basically a new version of the great arcade game, Arkanoid. You fire little bullets at bricks trying to beat different levels and it seems so fascinating while you do it.

The great thing about Brickbreaker is that it gives every analyst an activity for the 15-30 minutes he spends on the toilet every day pretending to have serious stomach malfunctions. My roommate can attest to how time seems to fly by when playing Brickbreaker as he takes the Browns to the Super Bowl, drops the kids off at the pool, or drops bricks. What used to be a 5 minute trip to the john before returning to purgatory at your desk, now is an enjoyable 20 minutes spent blowing shit up thanks to that devil of a blackberry we all have to hold.

I had a fellow analyst in my group who got to 100,000 points on Brickbreaker, which is an amazing accomplish since I have only gotten to 20,000 once before crapping the bed (yes, the pooping theme continues. Analysts are mature creatures). Well when he got to 100,000 points he still had 100 lives remaining and was literally bored of the game because it was too easy for him. After spending a minute calling him a loser and crying because he is that much better than me, I asked him what he would do next. Turns out he was so bored by the easiness of the game that he didn’t even feel like playing anymore. The problem is, this is a kid who is a part of the frequent flyer/crapper club and needed some activity while releasing the hounds. Without this little game to occupy his time in the loo (yeah I went British on you), his mind would be stuck on thinking about how much he hates his job. HELP! What can he do?

I see only one fix. I call on the makers of Oregon Trail to make a game for Blackberries. Not only is this one of the greatest games ever, but it also is pretty darn time consuming. Some other great features that make it the perfect game for analysts is the fact that you can name the characters with the names of those friends of yours that you have not seen in months, and feel like you are right there with them. That is until you cut their rations and they die of cholera, but that’s life… Oregon Trail also gives analysts the ability to use a gun to kill food, which allows us to take out our frustrations on an animal even dumber than an associate. Lastly, Oregon Trail has so many different levels and people that you can be, that the game will never lose its luster. So my fellow analysts, I urge you to join my petition to get this game for the Blackberry, or if it exists, post the link on the comment board. We all thank you in advance, and good luck with the dysentery and caulking that wagon and floating.