Читать книгу The Bucks Stop Here - Jim Parton - Страница 7

At the end of the week it was amazing how tired I’d get, given how little I had actually exerted myself. All stockbrokers believe they do a hard, stressful job and therefore justify the pay they earn. There is no doubt that a certain amount of discipline is required, to get in at 7.45 and survive until 5.30, and read the FT, which would be the world’s dullest newspaper if the Wall Street Journal were not duller. But it doesn’t take long to read the three articles a day in it which are relevant to you. I doubt that more than two per cent of brokers or fund managers ever read the editorial. Meanwhile it costs more than any of the other broadsheets. The Daily Telegraph sports section alone gives better value for money.

Some people do work long hours in the City, but usually as a result of some staying-on-at-work competition instigated by those with more ambition than sense. Very few jobs in the City require you ever to have two telephones strapped to the ears à la financial soap, and the infrequent bursts of frenetic activity are interspersed with very long periods of profound tedium, sometimes, no, often, lasting weeks on end.

Stockbrokers do not have stressful lives, and it is easy for incompetent people to avoid being fired. It is sometimes said that we deserve our high pay because we burn out early like soccer stars. This argument is entirely specious. If it is true it is because champagne is bad for you. As for the high pay being compensation for low job security, I fail to identify a correlation between low pay and high security. Somewhat the reverse in fact.

I guess that getting up at 6.30 every day does take its toll, but the only stress generated comes from trying to work up enthusiasm for the machinations of the Bundesbank or the business prospects of some Swedish rock tool manufacturer day in day out. The compensatory buzz of dealing in huge sums of money and calculating the percentage that would accrue to my bonus was not one that I often had.

Weekends were spent recovering from the Bundesbank or the rock tool manufacturer. It’s a shame to waste one’s precious days off, but usually I achieved nothing beyond a bit of shopping. Rika would give me inviolable instructions to dust mantelpieces, change sheets, wash them, hoover upstairs, put the rubbish out, clean the stove, buy some new shoes for Gen and other exciting leisure time activities. I violated them, I rebelled, I did nothing.

On Sundays, if nothing had been organised, Gen and I would nip round the corner to the local car boot sale to marvel at the array of merchandise on offer; most of which would be thrown away by Oxfam. I always came back at least a fiver poorer to the despair of Rika, who had a tendency to be less optimistic about the investment potential of my restoration projects.

With the junk we bought, Gen could recreate the road to Basra on News at Ten or, by the imaginative removal of tyres from toy cars and juxtaposition of Lego, an authentic Camberwell street scene. The fact that he possessed only broken toys made trips to his friend Rory’s house, with all its expensive kit from the Early Learning Centre, all the more exciting for him. Rory was a poisonous child, but because our toys didn’t come up to scratch we rarely had to reciprocate hospitality. This isn’t quite fair. Rory very much liked Gen’s broken toys, but Rory’s parents, being pushy, wanted him to Learn things Early. It really is a very clever name for a toy shop. You can’t help wishing a child with dyslexia on parents like Rory’s. They were also very keen for Rory to grow up as liberal on the subject of race as they were. Gen, being of yellowish hue, was a gentle initiation before exposure to the really hard stuff.

The tyranny of the Sunday papers was one of the worst things about being a stockbroker. It was dismal to have to plough through all that dreary journalism on company results and contracts on one’s day off on the vague chance that a journalist had come up with something that we didn’t know or fabricate a week ago.

I cycled in to work. In the world of the company GTI this marked me out as eccentric, but I did it because it was the only regular exercise I got, and public transport was so hopeless, and even on my wages I baulked at the cost of parking in the City. My colleagues Charlie and Henry shared a car in from near Camberwell, but that meant getting to Charlie’s house by 7 a.m. which was about half an hour too early for me, (or two and a half hours of lost sleep a week).

I kept three suit jackets on the back of my chair and the adjoining trousers in my European equities research filing cabinet, somewhere between Chemicals and Consumer Goods. This was necessary to avoid the tiresome ritual of having them hidden from me each day by Charlie; proof, perhaps, that the British are not necessarily endowed with a more sophisticated sense of humour than the Japanese.

At 7.30 a.m. there were few people about other than my colleagues, mainly ex-Army officers, so rather than walk all the way to the gents I always changed in the middle of the room.

In the morning meeting we learnt that L’Oreal might take over Revlon, that there were some important employment numbers coming up from the United States on Friday, and that Heineken’s earnings per share were up, as expected, by 12.3 per cent. Ericsson had won a small order from Kuwait to help rebuild its cellular phone network. And that was it.

Alick, our chief and mentor, ex-Guardsman, Old Etonian, therefore spent the morning writing a militaristic memo to New York demanding that the lazier analysts (nine out of twelve) be sacked. They were in a different league from the analysts at Phillips and Drew in terms of their industry, knowledge and experience, but Alick did have a point that some were lazy. The nice grandmother from the Bronx with the sexy anklet had let them become very “un-American” in their working habits.

To the New York head office, the European equities sales team (only four of us) was just a pimple on the backside of Merrill Lynch, and Alick its suppurating centre, so this memo was unlikely to have more effect than the previous twenty-five.

Meanwhile, Henry, ex-Guardsman, wife’s brother went to Eton, went round to the research department to photocopy the Telegraph crossword. He had been a more sybaritic, officers’ mess kind of soldier than Alick. He definitely hadn’t answered a ‘Join the Professionals’ ad. On days like this he would do about half of the puzzle, then ring up clients and flatter them by asking their advice on the clues he couldn’t do. This way of carrying on drove Alick spare, but so long as a large order from one of the flattered clients arrived once a fortnight or so, there was not a great deal he could do about it.

Charlie, very minor public school, Dad in the RAF, straight into the City, children will certainly go to Eton, (if they are bright enough to get in) was at twenty-five the youngest team member. He got directly on to the phone and didn’t get off it until he had told all his clients about the Kuwaiti phone order and Heineken’s e.p.s., even though all this mundane information was freely available on the Reuters screen. My three colleagues had all come from Swiss Bank Corp, then the Number One in Euro equities, where Charlie had been the most successful of them. His ‘This is the News’ service was important to fund managers because they needed to know what SBC were up to. The sad fact was that no European fund manager needed to know what Merrill Lynch was doing, so Charlie’s commission figures had slipped somewhat. They were still, however, in a different league from mine, but then I was Building-For-The-Long-Term.

(Self: can’t quite bring myself to admit minor public school, but it was a shock when I left to discover that most people haven’t heard of it. Famous old boy: John McCarthy. I can’t remember him at all, although my older brother, a senior prefect, claims to have busted him for smoking.)

Things brightened considerably with the arrival of a new trainee, a lovely Italian girl. She wore a contour-enhancing dress, a sculpted masterpiece of Milanese haute couture, with a zip all the way down the back, which somehow seemed to say, ‘undo me’.

She introduced herself. ‘I am juicy,’ she said. I, and several others, tried not to gasp too visibly.

‘You’re what?’

‘I am juicy,’ she repeated, and the truth gradually began to dawn that that was what she wanted to be called. Nobody could quite cope, and variants on Jose and Jessie were tried. It turned out that her name was Giusseppina, or Giussi for short.

Giussi was from the Merrill Lynch MBA training scheme in New York, and therefore knew next to nothing about economics, companies or broking their shares. She would be joining us on sales, but first she was to pick up what she could by observing the work being done by dealers, salesmen and analysts. In due course she would replace a nice, clean-cut young Dane entrusted to us until a few weeks previously, by which time his sincerity and enthusiasm had got us down.

Giussi had a lovely, naïve, doe-eyed way of asking questions, and of perching herself on the end of one’s desk in a way that most men, mesmerised, could not resist. ‘I am Giussi. Please let me revolve on your desk. I want to learn something,’ she’d say to the traders, charmingly oblivious to the double entendre.

Henry and Charlie were soon eating out of her lap, or would have been if they had got half a chance, and even Alick found time away from harassing the American senior management and the research department to help her with her questions.

My Japanese clients remained disquietingly quiet. Alick told me he’d discussed it with his boss, and that it was seventy per cent likely that I would be posted to Tokyo where business was still believed to be brisk (so I told my bosses). Rika would be delighted to be nearer home. I had severe misgivings about twelve-hour working days and proximity to my mother-in-law, although a nice tax free salary through Guernsey would always be welcome.

The next day I drove to work because it was raining. My Citroen BX 16 valve was not, perhaps, the petrolhead’s car of choice, but it went to 135mph and from nought to sixty in 6.9 seconds. A nice little runabout in London. As it was a company car I never cleaned it and the insides had eight months of biscuit and crisp crumbs pressed into the crushed velour of the back seat. In Camberwell there isn’t quite the pressure to wash a car that you get in, say, Purley.

I parked it in a very handy parking place just outside the office where the workmen had obliterated the yellow lines.

In the morning meeting we were told that, despite the dramatic pictures of burning oil in Kuwait, the world was awash with the stuff, and its price was likely to weaken for the next six months. Merrill Lynch had predicted a collapse in the oil price almost as soon as Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. At the time, the almost universal view was that oil would jump further from forty dollars to sixty or even a hundred, not fall back to twenty dollars as we were saying. It was very pleasing for a salesman to have told his clients something that actually turned out to be true: oil down = inflation down = interest rates down = markets up.

That had been twenty-five per cent ago, and my clients hadn’t bought a thing.

The Japanese have a pathological distrust of stockbrokers having been so comprehensively and continuously legged over by the likes of Nomura, so if a broker comes on with a well argued story, inevitably they assume that there must be some sort of catch. In early 1990, the Japanese had been very big buyers of Europe just before the Saddam crash. Because of their losses from this, some had gone as far as to ban their fund managers from investing at all during the war. They made the same mistake during the 1987 crash, thereby missing an opportunity to buy at the bottom.

Xenophobic politicians and protectionists who have complained about the ravages Japanese manufacturers have inflicted on our industry should reflect gratefully for a moment that Japanese investors have always been available to buy at the top, and sell at the bottom of our financial markets, which I suspect redresses the trade imbalance amply. (Not, of course, that the sophisticated and professional British and American fund managers with all their fabulously expensive and complex methods of prediction did any better in the run up to the Gulf War. They were just as scared to buy anything as the ‘amateur’ Japanese.)

The moral of the story for an investor has been to watch what the Japanese do, and do the opposite, although I am not sure how this investment strategy operates in the new era in which they may have no spare money to invest overseas.

After lunch, Wall Street opened strongly. Somebody from the New York office rang in with the information that there was massive buying of US shares and the largest number of small buy orders for four years. I called some of my clients but couldn’t panic them into purchasing anything. I ought to have been telling them to sell, as small orders = private individuals = unsophisticated investors = top of the market. There was no point though: as they hadn’t bought at the bottom they could hardly sell at the top.

At the next morning meeting I passed the time doing a survey of Hermès ties. Six out of nine men had them, a not untypical score. Giussi had a Hermès scarf. The three without them were myself, the electronics analyst, making a rare appearance at the meeting to tell us about one of his companies, and an exponent of the dismal science of economics from the bond department. Analysts would compromise their credibility if they dressed fashionably. They need to look gritty and industrial, as if they went to Northern grammar schools. It is always curious to see men on £100,000 a year wearing polyester shirts and ties with gravy stains down them, but it undoubtedly helps clients take them seriously. There must be an Old Etonian ex-Guardsman working as an analyst somewhere in the City, but I have yet to meet him.

By chance I was wearing Armani, bought for me several Christmases ago by Rika in a last ditch attempt to smarten me up, so I felt that I could announce the results of the survey without my own dishevelled appearance being the butt of too many unkind jokes, or being suspected of taking the piss.

This sparked an animated conversation about whether you could get Hermès ties cheaper at JFK, Heathrow or closer to source at Charles de Gaulle; I advocated Hong Kong’s excellent forgeries. American employment numbers looming up the very next day no less, temporarily took a back seat, despite the presence of the dismal scientist to explain them to us. Charlie said that he knew a little man who could turn a soiled Hermès tie inside out or back to front or whatever was necessary, and re-stitch it, as new, for as little as thirty-five pounds.

I got three orders, all about £100,000, so it could be said that I was busy. It didn’t really compare with the nine million pounds order Henry had been working for Barings over the last few days, or the two million pounds sell order in a defence contractor Alick had been eking out into the market for a Middle Eastern client who was no doubt in a position to make some clever guesses as to who would replace all that hardware lost in the Gulf War. One day the Japanese in London would be BIG in European equities and the market would tremble every time it got wind of an order emanating from Jim Parton. Sadly not yet. Still, Merrill Lynch was there for the long term.

Giussi’s father turned out to be the president of the chamber of commerce in Naples. It was only a few days into the job and she got her first order: not bad for a beginner. She hadn’t associated the company name – Daimler Benz – with the maker of the upmarket motor cars, but with half a dozen panting men helping her it was soon traded.

It was one of my duties to do the shopping at Tesco having picked up Gen. I liked the Brixton Tesco; they had lots of ethnic food, although Rika still had to travel to a Japanese shop to get the right brands of soy sauce and sesame oil.

As a stockbroker I could keep the shopping process under control, because I was fully conversant with the tricks supermarkets play to improve profits, mainly because in City presentations the heads of Tesco and Sainsbury’s boast about them. Tricks like stashing high margin products at the end of the aisles. As you slow to go round them, you see Blanquette de Veau Provençale aux Champignons (Medallions of Tasty Veal in a Savoury Mushroom sauce, Provence style, serves two to four). And because it seems like a good idea at the time, you buy it.

Gen always insisted on driving the trolley, so at the end of most aisles I was usually apologising for a collision, rather than loading up with high margin products. Gen was still not a victim of the great capitalist conspiracy, until, that is, the checkout counter where Tesco cynically stashed all the Crunchies and Smarties, knowing that harassed parents are more likely to give in to their children than cause a scene.

My skiing holiday was on the way to being arranged, although, as ever, Rika complained that pressure of work would prevent her from going. This was a kind of brinkmanship designed to force the rules of the trip, i.e. I would not abandon her, in a cloud of powder snow, to make her own way down the black piste. I had been skiing since I was six, she since she married me. It was a source of marital tension, made worse by the fact that every year we stayed at my parents’ rudimentary ex-ruin, 30km down the valley from Val d’Isere.

As a concession and an incentive, I allowed her to invite Chip, an American friend of hers who had been angling for an invitation.

Alick had been unable to get in a skiing holiday so a few weeks previously I had invited him. It could do no harm to my career, I reasoned, and he was a nice enough chap apart from a certain intolerance: of Henry for doing the crossword, the analysts for doing no work, and of the Americans for being American. His wife was inconsiderately about to drop mewling puker number three, so his skiing plans were up the spout.

Part of the attraction of inviting him was that he said he was a very good skier, and had never skied with anyone better than he, so he might be fun on the slopes. I had also invited Niall, fellow stalwart of the St Andrews University ski team, and completely fearless madman, who used to do scree skiing down disused slag heaps (i.e. with no snow on). I had a lurking fear, or perhaps hope, that Alick would be shown up. And not only by Niall, but by myself, formerly number sixty-three in Great Britain in slalom, and in 1980, the fastest through the bumps at the British Freestyle Championship by six whole seconds (worst points for style, result: second last).

Alick had grown markedly less bullish over the weeks about his brilliant skiing. He hadn’t had time to get fit and, because his wife had developed the habit of having a baby at this time of the year, hadn’t had a decent skiing holiday for several years. I was gently disabusing him of the notion that he would be staying in my parents’ ‘chalet’, or indeed in a Peter Mayle-style rustic idyll surrounded by lots of cheery yokels with bloodshot cheeks from drinking too much vin rouge. He was going to stay in a converted cowshed, parts of which still contained fossilised cow dung.