A friend of ours tracked down this reddit thread discussing this article and the negative comments are exactly why the haters will remain in… the Ninety Nine percent. If you read the article and your takeaway is that we are 1) unhappy, 2) leeches or 3) angry about our lives here’s some good news for you we already know what your day looks like because you’re a loser. We are creating a platform to motivate and inspire. In addition, if you’re interested in getting into Wall Street we are giving you the tools you need. Maybe we are just stealing from you though… feel free to explain.
This is going to be a relatively long post because no one else is going to take the time to explain all of the “philosophical” arguments in a single post but lets get this started.
1) We Make Money By Doing Nothing. Myth. If you believe this is true have fun working in finance for your first 5-7 years because you won’t be seeing any sunlight but that’s not a problem because you’re certainly working harder than us already… Right?
2) We Create Zero Value. Thank you professor in no job experience. Let me ask you a simple question. If we told you that we can sell your current house on the market for 10% above the current bidding price you are receiving… are you willing to give us 200bps? Now if you own a business and we can get you 10% higher on your Multi-million dollar business now would you be willing to give us 200bps? Well that zero value argument died in a hurry.But maybe… you believe raising capital has no value.
3) Capital Raising is “Free Money”. This one is another automatic gag reflex. Let’s take a second to remember a story:
“There once was a time way back in the past where a young man had a great idea for a website. This young man was extremely competitive and rebelled against everything from his Ivy League Institution to job offers from major corporations. The idea was so great but he just didn’t have the capital to grow the business. Flash forward just a few years later and that Company is now worth tens of billions of dollars, the story is so great that they made a movie about it, that company is called Facebook.”
Wait, that story was awful because we wanted to choose an example that actually adds value to your life. Interesingly this guy IPO’d his own life. Lets move along.
If you believe that capital raising is bad, then you must ask yourself these two questions. Is the recognition of talent or a solid business idea a useless skill? Is salesmanship a useless skill?By correctly delivering the business proposition to investors and finding people to outlay real dollar bills you are adding a lot of value, one might say you’d be fit for a job in Venture Capital.
4) These Guys Are Depressed. Hard work is hard you should just quit. If you don’t enjoy working hard you are going to fail at life. The difference between a winner and loser is entirely in your mind. If you find someone who enjoys failing more than us please send them our way. Failing is fun because failure is just practice.If you get blown out by a 9.5… good you’re closer to the next one. If you lose your job? Guess what it is time to grind and find another one, you might even get one that pays better.
We will tell you one thing with absolute certainty, if you work as hard as possible you will become a more successful person. Knowing this statement is true since hard work leads to results how can hard work be depressing? It can’t if you want to win.
5) Money Buys Happiness. This is going to fly above most people’s heads. Lets go take a jaunt to a fundraiser shall we? Hmm… why is this place full of successful people? Successful people want to help you win and part of helping you win is giving you opportunity. If a man is starving, dying of thirst, sleeping on concrete and you hand him food he will be infinitely happier than the “life experiences” you received backpacking through a jungle with your iPhone and iPod. When we die, since we won’t be having any kids in this lifetime, every single penny will be dropped into a charity. Maybe this makes us bad people.
If you’re busy blaming other people for your life failures: Wall Street, Corporations, your parents, your brother, your Facebook “Friendddssszzzz”, your 5’6″ height and your brown instead of blue eye color and you are not working hard you should blame yourself. If your number one instinct is to try and bring someone down, you should try bringing people up instead. A real man of value makes everyone around him better.
Lets take a quick glance now and see if we’re the bad people or not, you can take your life advice from us where we received this email just under 2 hours ago.
“Hi WSPs,
Wow, I don’t know what to say. Thank you so much for putting so much work to edit my resume during Easter weekend. I really appreciate it. Now I am going to work in it per your suggestions and get back to you ASAP…
Thanks again and have a good week ahead,
Name”
Or you can take advice from some broke reddit keyboarder whose name is “Throw in the Towel”.
“What a terrible read. This blog didn’t motivate me at all. If this is his average day then this guy’s life sounds absolutely miserable. Do something you enjoy guys. Wealth is not everything like this idiot is saying.”
We are trying to build trust where we can all win. The decision is yours.
Hahaha I am laughing from my office desk from the throwing in the towel comment in my shitty cubicle. Pulling another all nighter.
I wish I had this shit when I was recruiting, your answers are spot on man.
This is probably the best post I’ve ever seen breaking down the idea that finance adds zero value.
It seems like most people who believe it adds no value are young people and people who never made the jump to revenue generation.
I wonder how many people will realize this post is true.
Blaming the mortgage crisis on all bankers and all of Wall Street is no different than believing that all women are warm hearted.
Who the hell would be stupid enough to believe all women are warm-hearted?
Have they lived all their life in a cave? Alone? On Mars?
All women are gold-digging parasites looking to prostitute themselves to the highest bidder their beauty will attract. You’re a means to an end for them. The end in which they get to play out their princess fairytale delusions.
I’m going to address your points re: the nature of your profession. I actually think the “day in the life” post is a fine one and there are many arguments to be made that working incredibly hard is the general path toward success in whatever endeavor one undertakes.
However, i think most of the criticisms levied at bankers (i’ll focus on IBs for the moment) is that they take outsized rewards for whatever value they do bring to the table. I don’t think anyone seriously argues that bankers provide ZERO value. That’s stupid. But i do think there are various legitimate criticisms to be made.
1. Obviously, bankers work hard. So do people in lots of other professions. Bankers do seem to take a perverse pleasure in this–i guess they must to get the adrenaline pumping and to convince themselves that whatever sacrifices they make are worth it (lots of people do this)–and seem to like to brag but this is more about impugning the shitty personalities that are, sometimes, attracted to the street. Nobody really thinks that you do literally nothing. But it is arguable whether everything you do adds a commensurate amount of value.
2. How much value bankers create is a contentious topic. In some cases, you guys are great. In other cases (e.g. the RMBS supply chain) you guys added fuel to a really shitty fire and made things way worse than they could have been. Sometimes you’re sorely necessary. Other times, like when you have an investment-grade client, the bonds sell themselves and you take something approaching zero risk and make a few million for doing almost nothing. Raising capital is nice. Dotcom bubbles because bankers wanted to IPO every business that bought a URL are not. The point is that liquidity and capital are important but they are not categorically more important than anything else. Bankers need to calm down and take an objective view of their profession.
Also, you get paid WAY too much for whatever value you do provide. And let’s not forget the thousands of jobs that investment banks are currently shedding. Finance is neither a safe nor easy place to make money. Really nothing is, anymore.
The issue is complicated. Ultimately, bankers should have more humility and a better understanding of their role in the economy. They are not THAT important, whatever they tell themselves.
Your points regarding how to live life stand.
See here’s the thing.
You can’t just make a statement with no facts.
1) “But it is arguable whether everything you do adds a commensurate amount of value.”
The example written in #2 is exactly how the fee structure is set up 1-2% commission on transaction value. This is less than half of what is made on real estate sales:
http://qna.mortgagenewsdaily.com/questions/closing-costs-for-your-new-home
So If a real estate agent sells a $10M house and he gets. $200K from the deal. Why are you attacking an investment banker who sells a small $10M company and receives $200K? These are real numbers and exactly how the M&A process works.
This is not an insult it is a serious question and the above is not a “fake” example. Real numbers.
2) If you raise bonds the fees are lower and this is conflating the equities market with the debt markets. See here. http://wallstreetplayboys.com/?p=608
So with that said blaming investment bankers for what investors want to invest in does not make sense. If you want to buy a billion packs of cigars why should the person selling the cigar be attacked. If you have thousands of investors blowing up your phones like a call girl at 2am wanting to buy “Tech bubble stock” at 100x P/E when every single comparable sold at 100x P/E are you not doing your job? Again this logic has fallen apart.
Again you must prove this statement “you get paid WAY too much for whatever value you do provide”. Based on what. Explain how this is different from the real estate example the real numbers are on the page.
If you want to use the mortgage crisis example you’re going to get nothing but head nods from us but that is an incredibly small portion of Wall Street.
“Finance is neither a safe nor easy place to make money” No risk no reward. We never said it was easy. http://wallstreetplayboys.com/?p=589
With that said, a declining economy is one where the rich are vilified.
This is ridiculous EVERYONE KNOWS people like you are what RUINED the economy!
Yes typing in capital letters ! points and having no factual information of how our jobs are unrelated is how you win in life.
Want a lollipop? Lil Wayne can help you out.
most of the guys who are not successful or rich just rationalize that it’s not THAT important to them, so that they don’t have to re-evaluate a whole belief system and put in a lot of energy to better themselves. they actually really believe those superficial clichees about wallstreet people in order to protect their fragile egos.
yep. spot on.
As a participant in the Occupy Wall Street movement, I can tell you for sure that it is wrong to label all of Wall St as “crooks and liars”, and that “guys like you” as the problem, just because of principle.
First of all – anyone who is prepared to work 20 hour days gets my respect. That is real life American knowhow and hard work. Work insanely hard – get rewarded, that’s the American dream, and a dream that I believe in as a new citizen of the United States.
The “problem”, as hippy as it sounds, is the “system”, the same system that was responsible for people losing their life savings in an instant – and NOONE being held accountable for it. The same “system” where a multi billion dollar corporation pays less in taxes than a regular person. The same system where corporate productivity is sky high, but worker compensation has stayed the same. The same system where leaders of government and leaders of the business world are interchangeable.
Want a kick in the nuts? Obama hired Michael Taylor as Deputy Commissioner for the FDA. Michael Taylor used to be a VP at Monsanto. Yes, Obama hired a guy that is gonna protect us from guys like him.
The Occupy Movement had those messages, but those messages got diluted, and it was heart breaking to see. “Change the system” slowly became “bankers are bad”.
But don’t worry, WallStreetPlayboys – us occupiers were hit too, and hit harder. “Angry motivated people with a message” became “dirty smelly hippies”. I did not believe the “radical left” existed, but boy was I wrong. The radical left co opted the movement to make it about them. I remember there was a big deal to start using “preferred gender pronouns”. There’s a video out there of someone speaking of a podium, urging people to call them “Zi” instead of he and she. Thats what it devolved to.
But the worst possible thing about Occupy Wall St, and what turned me and many others off the movement – the “Progressive Stack”. The fucking progressive stack…. fuck… Long story short – if you are a white male, you speak last because everyone else is more “oppressed” than you. And when you got a chance to express your opinion – it didn’t count because of your “privilege”. In an effort to combat inequality, we became unequal. The unity was broken. Lots of people left after that.
I’d like to think that the legacy of occupy wall st is one of education, and if some people out there learned how the world worked and how they were beng taken advantage of – then it was a success, because education is the first step in change.
And speaking of education – by telling us more about Wall St – by educating us, you are doing us a service, so thank you.
Solid post. Agree, bankers did not suffer on a relative basis during the hit, but to blame every single position within the space shows a lack of education or knowledge of Wall St.
Expecting someone to be held responsible for the GFC is ridiculous and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what happened. It’s not like a murder where you can find the perpetrator and prosecute them.
The mess started with the Carter administration and snowballed from there. Successive administrations fuelled the property bubble and people’s entitlement mentality of home ownership. You ended up with a market where a large part of it was infected with bad loans to people that couldn’t afford the repayments.
Blaming bankers is the height of stupidity. Banks try to realise the NPV of the book value of their loans to get the cash now. Packaging these loans was just a normal part of this process. Moreover, the US government had guaranteed the loans (see a speech by Dubya back in 2002 for a good example of this guarantee) so they became AAA securities.
If you want to blame someone blame every voter who votes for a system that promises to give them something they haven’t earned.
Vote for Trump 2016!
WSP, is Matt Taibbi a “hater”?
You’ve destroyed the line of reasoning from all the fags on Reddit and Zucotti Park. Great job, that’s like an NFL player showing up to the high school JV football game and throwing down. What do you make of people like Taibbi? Is he just another hater or what?
He is just another person who thinks the bailing out of banks was a bad move. Throw him into the 99% bucket.
(Note we do not allow links to articles of no value so the link you posted to his blog has been removed).