Michael Metelits
I admit it. I was a yuppie during the 1980s. Not just any kind of yuppie, either. I was the trade settlement operations manager for a small, but nonetheless venal, investment management firm in Boston.
I sat on the trading floor and witnessed a great deal of what the Eighties had to offer. The long-term legacy of this post-university stint includes an appreciation for financial markets, a smoking habit and an aversion to handling other people’s money.
Probably the defining event of my tenure was the crash of October 1987. One of our partners was old enough to have been in his first Wall Street job during the 1929 crash. He just stood on the trading floor staring at the screen, crying the whole afternoon.
The rest of us, not yet being partners, had other things to do. Panic was high on the list. The head of bond trading came running out of his office every 20 minutes screaming, “How much are we losing?” -and when somebody tried to answer he’d tell them to shut up and sell.
His partner, a less emotionally unstable type, just asked once, “So is this the end of the world as we know it?” Which, of course, it wasn’t.
I laughed when I came back from the men’s room to find the stock market down 500 points when it had only been down 350 when I left. The traders were laughing, and the partners were checking their retirement plans.
Unfortunately, most of the urban legends from the Eighties about yuppies are true. When employment numbers came out, bond traders went crazy either buying or selling, depending on the news itself. Each trader had a phone with a bank of buttons and direct lines to trading partners.
So the day before job figures were to be released, we paid a phone technician $100 to rewire one particularly obnoxious trader’s phone. All the buttons lit up, but the connections would go to different firms, or the hairdresser we knew she went to. Her boss was in on it, so the fact that she couldn’t do any work for the first three hours of the day didn’t hurt anything except her nerves.
Securities transfers still had to be delivered physically. So you would get some pensioner walking around the streets of New York carrying a briefcase full of $50-million or $200- million in British gilts. Sometimes the pensioner, or his briefcase, would get lost. I’d get a call from some client or a trader at another firm screaming, “Where the fuck is my $50- million?”
Occasionally, even in Boston, traders would send strippers on to the trading floor as a “gift” for someone’s birthday. The preferred tactic in the months leading up to one’s birthday was to profess shock and horror at these events, hoping against hope that one’s colleagues would try to embarrass you by sending one your way. The major explanation for this bit of excess is that we were mostly in our mid-twenties, and we all had more money than sense.
But stressed as we were, ours wasn’t as bad as other investment firms. Some practised a Darwinian approach where traders knew how they were doing by the position of their desk. The worst- performing trader sat closest to the door, and one day would disappear through it and out of a job.
Chronically hypertense, stressed, newly divorced and incalculably wealthier than I am today, I quit the business, moved to the more laid-back California, and got a less hectic job as a bike messenger.
ENDS