Читать книгу The Bucks Stop Here - Jim Parton - Страница 8

On Friday evening Rika and I went round to dinner with Rory’s parents. Gen and Rory cavorted upstairs until about eleven o’clock. Rory had got Scalectrix for his fifth birthday.

‘That’s quite a generous present for such a young child,’ I remarked to Rory’s Dad.

‘Oh, it was only ninety-three pounds’ he replied. It must have taken considerable negotiation with Rory’s Mum to have got away with not getting something wholesome and wooden from the Early Learning Centre for about the same amount of money.

Rory’s Mum was adamant that Rory would not be allowed to play with guns, a disappointment to Gen who was heavily into the Gulf War at the time. He became quite adept at smuggling arms into Rory’s house. I got a bit of an earful from her about the secret arms factory discovered under Rory’s bed. Rory had said Gen made them. I tried to explain that boys play with guns, cars and bicycles, and girls play with dolls, but she would have none of it.

Rory’s Dad was a partner in a big City law firm, plutocratic, but slightly embarrassed about it. The other guests were carefully selected to offset capitalist pig-dogs like him and me; a teacher, an artist, a doctor and his wife. Why was it that when asked my profession on occasions like this I always found myself saying ‘investment banker’ rather than ‘equity salesman’ or even plain ‘stockbroker’?

Next morning, Gen woke up at 8.30-ish, a bit of a result from an exhausted parent’s point of view, but still far too early for me. He acceded to my exhortations to go downstairs and play with his toys for about five minutes before coming back up alternatively to bounce on my head and try to force my eyes open with his fingers. For some reason I lost the battle to have a lie-in, so ended up giving the urchin his breakfast while his mother snored on upstairs. In any case, now was the time for sycophancy if I wanted her to come skiing with me; in addition to getting up early I dusted the mantelpieces, changed the sheets, washed them, hoovered upstairs, put the rubbish out, and on Sunday, even bought Gen some boot-legged shoes as instructed (Reebok, five pounds reduced from thirty-five, as smart as Rory’s) from the car boot sale.

On Monday I was late to work because, as usual, I had forgotten to iron a shirt. Rika had embraced those parts of the Western feminist canon that suited her with great enthusiasm, and had never been known to do one for me.

My brain was already on holiday. Had it not been, I would have noticed the car pulling out in front of me on the Elephant and Castle roundabout. I had read some reassuring statistics saying that only eighteen Londoners had been killed on bicycles that year, a highly acceptable rate of attrition, making it much safer than the tube. I executed a neat, if involuntary, somersault over the bonnet before landing on my feet unhurt, my bicycle was also undamaged, thereby avoiding becoming the nineteenth. The only casualty was a limp-looking wing mirror on the car.

I recounted my tale to Alick, who said ‘I bet he was black’. Irritatingly, he was right.

The morning meeting was dominated by some unpronounceable Swedish company’s results; Rock tools good, Cemented Carbide weak, Special Stainless poor, Wire and Strip poor, but Tubes OK, and the tax charge respectably low. Earnings per share would fall in 1991, and probably be lower still in 1992, because of exposure to the US car industry. A bunch of Swedish speculators had been ramping the shares recently so it was an obvious sell. I wondered how I was going to explain all this in Japanese.

Mr Hoshide took the plunge and bought some of the unpronounceable Swedish tool maker; he was humble enough to admit that he had been a bit of a turnip not following my advice on the oil price, and made this order as a sign of trust. £500,000 was a large size for him, indeed the biggest order I’d had for several months. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had been recommending a sell. Fund managers are grown people and can make their own decisions, I reasoned. Who cared anyway, when the money belonged to a group of policy holders in Fukuoka, a group whose existence was, to me, entirely abstract.

After getting Gen to bed at the unheard of early hour of nine o’clock, I enjoyed a lovely romantic candlelit dinner cooked for me by Rika, who was free, for once, of the exigencies of her jovial Japanese workmates and their requirement to wind down from their documentary on the Changing of the Guard in a karaoke bar.

Over dinner she told me that she would probably be able to come skiing, but on certain conditions.

1 I would carry her skis.

2 Every lunchtime would be spent in a restaurant.

3 I would never abandon her at the top of the mountain and say, ‘Meet you by the car’.

4 I would devote time to teaching her how to ski.

5 She would not have to do any cooking, washing or cleaning. (This was not so different from the way things were at home.)

6 On the other hand, she wanted to be in charge of the shopping. (I would use the word ‘spending’ not ‘shopping’.)

7 She demanded a single bed, because she knew what too much vin rouge does to me. (My father, in his concern over the decay in morals coincident with his children’s late teens and early twenties, built only bunk beds to a careful design of his own, impossible to push together, but there was still one double bed. I had my hopes.)

Normally, Monday evening would be early-to-bed night, the night when I caught up on the sleep I had failed to catch up on at the weekend, but with a holiday looming I was feeling a bit demob happy, indeed a touch reckless. I had survived a near fatal accident, got some decent business off Mr Hoshide, and the wife was coming skiing. I reckoned I might get luckier still provided, of course, I disabled all Rika’s telecommunications equipment so that nobody would ring in from the Tokyo morning to the middle of the English night.

Tuesday morning passed in a haze. I was tired but happy. I didn’t even notice what Giussi was wearing.

Mr Hoshide phoned up very excited. His unpronounceable Swedish stock had gone up five per cent already. ‘Thank you Parton san, very good recommendation. Why is it so strong today?’ I modestly admitted that we’d been doing a bit of buying. The fact that it had been his own stock purchase pushing up the price was neither here nor there. He gave me an order to buy 3,000 Deutsche Bank, another half a million pounds or so. More than adequate recompense for a profitable misunderstanding.

My skiing holiday was virtually arranged, which was just as well with only a few days to go. I always left it to the very last moment in the belief that people would fall over themselves with gratitude at being invited, with the result that by the time it got mentioned to anyone of my choice they had already booked up elsewhere, so I ended up having to invite people like Alick and the wife’s friend Chip.

Dramatis Personae, skiing holiday. (Provisional.)

1 Me.

2 Rika (possibly/probably, the latter two-to-one on, favourite).

3 Chip, American friend of above.

4 Niall, lunatic Scotsman.

5 Alick, boss. He would join us in the middle of the first week some time.

6 Verona, twenty-seven, the youngest ever director of Breese, Spotch and Betts, advertising agency.

We were still short of a car, and it occurred to me that Verona probably had a nice company car. A quick telephone call, veiled threat of withdrawal of invitation, and a Maserati Biturbo convertible had been made available, but on condition of Verona bringing her sister Sienna. So,

1 Sienna, younger sister to the above.

Mr Hoshide’s Swedish stock went up another seven per cent, making a total of twelve in two days. I advised him to take profits, which he did. I liked Mr Hoshide, he did what he was told. There was a chance he would miss a further rise, but from my point of view to sell was a risk-free recommendation. If he didn’t take my advice to take profits, and the stock fell, I would be proved right again. If it went up further he’d pat himself on the back for knowing more about the markets than his broker, so he would be pleased either way.

He told me that he had no plans for the Easter holiday other than to relax, go to the park and do a bit of shopping with his wife. I persuaded him that as he was in Europe for only a short while he should get out and see a bit of it. I even got him to agree to take a couple of extra days off. ‘When in Lome, do as the Lomans.’ Result: an afternoon on the phone to various travel agents trying to arrange an Easter break for him and Mrs Hoshide.

Since the end of the Gulf War, all those cowards who had been too scared to get on an aeroplane for fear of meeting an untimely death at the hands of Saddam’s terrorists had been making up for lost time: as if terrorists would have had any interest at all in nonentities like senior Merrill Lynch management, who were re-emerging from under their stones in New York to take their wives shopping in London and enact some delayed redundancies in London at the same time. They had probably missed the safest travel conditions ever, with all that hysterical extra airport security, and far fewer travellers.

This pent-up demand for travel meant that organising an Easter break for Mr and Mrs Hoshide was next to impossible. Preferred destinations of Venice, Barcelona and Prague being unavailable at the price, I eventually got them on a coach tour of East German industrial installations, topical if nothing else. They would be able to buy themselves a chunk of Berlin Wall, some nice Dresden china to take home, and have themselves photographed next to a Trabbie.

Giussi got some more orders. Her Italian clients were turning out rather well. It all goes to show that it is not what you know, but who you know. What you look like does no harm either.

One excitement at the time was that Alick, Henry and Charlie had been interviewing a Nordic person, who had impressed them a great deal. ‘A bit of a bandit,’ he had been described as. When asked his salary, he had named successively higher figures to each of them, as he felt more confident.

Logistically, I wondered how this was going to work, because there weren’t any spare work stations in our area.

Nordic people are staid and dull on paper, but they can out-spiv any East Ender. Scandinavian institutions, out of naïvety one assumes, are used to paying far larger commissions on international stocks than others. You can often make them pay 0.5 per cent commission on a UK stock, for example, when a UK institution might pay 0.2 per cent or nothing at all.

I had an exciting time picking up Gen from Rory’s. I double-parked, as usual, leaving the keys in the ignition, as usual. When Gen and I turned to walk to where the car had been, only ten yards from the house, it had gone. Nicked, purloined, schnaffeled, rustled, Rikappropriated. I had had my back turned to it for a maximum of a minute. Rory’s Mum saw a man take it as she was talking to me.

‘Oh, I didn’t realise it was yours.’ Her description for the police was particularly useful. ‘Man in a green sweatshirt.’

I dialled 999 for the first time in my life.

‘Police, fire or ambulance?’

‘Police, quick.’ Three minute wait.

Any chance of heading the car off evaporated rapidly.

I had to give various fatuous details like my name and address to some police message-clearing centre. By the time an alert reached Camberwell the car would be in Croydon. Imagine if it were more serious; ‘I, Jim Parton, no, not Jim Parsons, Parton as in the buxom singer, ha, ha, ha, of Twenty-eight Dunroamin’ Villas, yes, ‘n’ apostrophe, am fending off a frenzied axe murderer, could you come and save me?’

Having the same surname as Dolly Parton is quite handy. For some reason, certain types of people find it hilarious to call me Dolly. For my part, I find this tendency a useful and infallible index as to whether or not my interlocutor is a prat.

The car had only been a company car, but its theft was a serious blow to the skiing holiday.

It was Friday, and the last morning meeting before freedom. The disappointing demise of my car didn’t stop me making some brilliant remarks about Hermès ties and the ex-Army officer’s need for conformity. The electronics analyst with the gravy stains found me amusing, and I even raised a faint titter from the exponent of the dismal science.

There was news that Ron the redundant market maker had got another job already, and would be starting with a Japanese securities house on Monday. That made just two weeks unemployed. I thought he was off his head; I could never understand the urgency some people had to pile back into work when they had just received a fat redundancy cheque and could therefore take a nice long holiday.

Giussi asked why it was that the unpronounceable Swedish stock, which had risen another eight per cent since Mr Hoshide’s sale, making a total of twenty, was going up when our analyst had said it was a sell.

‘More buyers than sellers, Giussi,’ came an irony laden chorus from around the table. This is stockbroker speak for ‘We don’t know’.

It would take Giussi about a year to work out that stock analysts’ earnings forecasts are rarely right and that even when they are, it is just as rare for the shares to react in the way expected. There are just too many unpredictable variables such as Berlin Wall falls (shares rise, border guard gets crushed), Saddam invades Kuwait (shares fall, plump Arabs flee), unemployment increases for the tenth month running (shares do nothing at all), general panic occurs for no identifiable reason (shares crash, or, just as likely, soar).

Many stockbrokers are vain enough to believe that they might be capable of supplying correct recommendations. Equally, many fund managers think they can act correctly on the recommendations, or cleverly disagree with them. A dartboard is a more valuable tool than a fund manager’s judgement, because at least then you save his monstrous fees.

The discreet use of insider knowledge is the only sure way of beating the dartboard. Contrary to popular opinion, this is surprisingly rare. I don’t think I was ever in possession of this kind of information, in a form in which I could act on it and make myself a fortune. I once acted on a tip that a company was going to be taken over, but it turned out to be wrong.

There are occasional successes by analysts. Derek Terrington at UBS Phillips and Drew was not allowed to express his fears about Maxwell because the corporate finance department were touting for business. Instead he wrote, ‘Can’t Recommend A Purchase – Hold’, an acronymical way of telling clients what he really thought. (A good analyst, he is no longer at P & D. The analyst who was so keen on Polly Peck still works there.)

Ads for unit trusts mention that ‘the value of investments can go down as well as up’. They ought to carry the warning that seventy per cent of professionally-managed funds underperform the indices they are trying to beat. Unit trusts are bad for your wealth.

I have yet to see a study that proved that professional fund manager ‘A’, or his company, consistently turns in superior performances in all market conditions. Any fund manager with a couple of years at the top of his table is sensible to use the opportunity to move to a higher paid job, because it is improbable that his luck will last. The chances are that he will move, not through a cynical understanding of what little value his abilities have, but through a genuine belief that he is worth more than he is paid. And brokers, of course, encourage this vanity; if they can get a client into a bigger institution it means more commission for them.

The fund manager himself spends his whole working life being fawned upon by brokers, and ends up with the genuine belief that he is witty, companionable, and highly analytical, and the mildest wimps become quite intolerably arrogant. Any given stockbroking salesman actively dislikes nine out of ten fund managers, frequently his best client most of all.

Alick used to put it this way: ‘Would you invite your clients home for dinner?’ And the answer, in his case, was only two of them from a list of twenty or so. I don’t think I am damaging his business prospects in revealing this; the other eighteen will all believe they are one of the two.

It is a funny relationship. Fund managers look down upon brokers because they believe themselves to be brighter. Brokers look down on fund managers for being so dumb as to be fund managers and therefore paid considerably less.

Until the Gulf War at least, Alick’s biggest and best client was a no-flies-on-me East Ender at the Kuwait Investment Office, called Bernie. The K.I.O. had massive funds (slightly less post-Saddam), and for such a fund to make meaningful investments, they had to be big. At Christmas, Alick sent Bernie a book, Blood in the Streets by Lord Rees-Mogg. It has turned out to be rather prescient, predicting crashes, and the current slump. Bernie rang back and said, ‘I don’t want a fucking book, send us some wine.’ Alick sent him some wine.

Because of the size of the orders, and the ferocity of Bernie, Alick would run around like a headless chicken each time he got one, in a panic that it wasn’t executed properly by the dealers. I lost count of the number of times that Alick was threatened with being struck off Bernie’s small list of preferred brokers. I think this salesman-client relationship worked because Bernie, the barrow boy, got a kick out of pushing Alick, the Old Etonian, around.

Fund managers get paid bonuses in relation to performance against a yardstick such as the FTSE 100 index, whereas brokers get a bonus related to the amount of commission they make, which is unrelated to any index, only the level of activity. We brokers can develop selective memories if we have the misfortune for example, to recommend a Polly Peck or a Maxwell shortly before it collapses. For us to advise such an investment carries no personal risk whatsoever, whereas for a fund manager to follow the advice could set his career back quite severely. Giving advice is risk free, taking it is fraught with danger.

I assume that all this is pretty fundamental stuff to anyone who works in the City, but maybe not. I was constantly surprised at brokers who were genuinely indignant when fund managers didn’t give them business despite ‘brilliant’ recommendations. If they really knew which stocks were going to go up they wouldn’t altruistically pass this information on. They would all be retired millionaires.

For the record, in my time, apart from getting the oil price right in the Gulf War, I have earnestly recommended Polly Peck (my employers Phillips and Drew were particularly keen on it at the time), Maxwell and other disaster areas, all at their peak. I also bought an expensive house in 1989, thinking it was near the bottom of the market, and made a decision to back the Japanese and their money in 1986. This last had served me well, but time was running out.

On hearing the sad fate of my car, Alick asked his usual ‘Was it a black man, Dolly?’ As somebody who occasionally smuggled in a copy of the Guardian in a brown paper bag to read on the loo, it irritated me to have to reply in the affirmative.

Fortunately half a dozen people in the bond department had been fired recently so the company car man was able to offer me an immediate replacement. He was very understanding about my having left the keys in the ignition. ‘Would have done it myself, mate.’ His pay was obviously not linked to insurance premiums for his cars.

He offered me the loan of a Vauxhall Astra GTE, one year old, lots of valves, 8,500 miles. It had seen better days, with special features like jagged holes for the various stolen radio components, scrape marks from parking misjudgements or errant supermarket trolleys, a forlorn stump for an ex wing mirror and doors that could only be opened from the outside. The ashtrays were full, so the floor had been used instead.

It was a typical company car.