Michael Lewis (Liar’s Poker, Moneyball) has written some amusing rules to keep your skin in Wall Street massacre:
The first thing you need to know about recessions is that they don’t signal the end of anything on Wall Street.They’re more like a red flag during a Formula One race: The cars coast gently around the track until the wreckage is cleared whereupon they all roar off as if the accident never happened. The difference is that, on Wall Street, it’s possible to make the disaster work for you.
You can inch your car quietly forward so, when the race recommences, you’re its surprise leader.
Rule No. 1: Betray your employer before your employer betrays you.
Chances are, if you work on Wall Street, you work for some giant corporation. Citigroup Inc., say, or Merrill Lynch & Co. The sheer size of these firms may convince you that they are, essentially, secure, that there is no better place to ride out a storm than among the tens of thousands of fellow employees.This is a mistake.
No Safety in Numbers
There’s seldom any safety in numbers, and the more parlous the situation, the more dangerous it is to be in it with a lot of other people. London during an outbreak of the bubonic plague, the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina, the New Jersey suburbs: People are always clustering together precisely where and when they should not.
In World War I, hordes of men charged directly into machine- gun fire, no doubt reassured that they weren’t alone.
The hole you should crawl into, he says, is a hedge fund.
Rule No. 2: Remember what you are selling.
No matter what you’ve told yourself in good times, to justify the huge paychecks you have received, you aren’t selling actual money-making expertise. For decades, brokers and money managers as a group have underperformed the market. Yet ordinary investors continue to solicit their advice and pay them for their services. Why?Greed, contrary to popular belief, isn’t what keeps this strange wheel spinning. Greed eventually gropes its way to self- interest. In good times, the dominant psychological impulse can be mistaken for greed but what’s really going on is that a lot of people are worried everyone else is getting rich and they aren’t.
At the bottom of the Wall Street money machine isn’t greed but anxiety. [...] A calm investor is one who might think twice before investing in your hedge fund.
You need to learn to talk to investors in new ways. To frighten them so terribly that they feel compelled to pay someone to hold their sweaty hands.
Rule No. 3: Hide your motives.
Or, specifically, minimize the appearance of financial interest.Don’t tell anyone how well you’re doing for yourself, for example, not even women you have just met. Recessions blow in with them a general backlash against worldly pleasures and material obsessions.
You must reckon with this shift in public values, for it will occur even on Wall Street, and threaten to expose your ambition as freakish. A lot of people you thought you knew are about to rediscover what’s important in life: wife, kids, the love of one’s fellow man. But you are not.
Don’t worry: it’s temporary. This is still America.