Morning Coffee: Advice on how to steal an MD’s job. The firm that lets you pretend to be a $20m trader.

Although there’s no shortage of careers advice available to people in the banking industry, it might be said that there’s a gap in the market for brutally cynical, brutally honest careers advice from someone with experience of what they’re talking about.  Craig Coben, the former global head of equity capital markets at Bank of America, is apparently aiming to fill that gap.

Coben opens his advice column with a piece of wisdom that’s as important as it ought to be obvious – that if you have to ask for advice about how to play the game of internal politics, then you’re almost certainly better off not bothering. And consequently, if you have a boss that’s always taking credit for other people’s work, ingratiating himself with the higher-ups and shifting the blame for mistakes … well, do you really want to take on someone like that?  Might it not make sense to start off your journey into Machiavellian intrigue with a slightly softer target? 

An even more brutal and obvious truth is that the banking industry basically splits into two kinds of people.  There are normal human beings, who are mainly concerned with their own self-interest but who want to do a good job and work for the benefit of their team.  And there are the the ones who are purely concentrated on their own advancement and compensation and regard any other motivation as silly and incomprehensible.

If you have a psychopath for a boss, there’s not much you can do about it. Just try to ensure that their interests are roughly aligned with yours, be incredibly careful not to appear like you’re standing between them and something they want and check yourself occasionally to make sure that your own standards of behaviour haven’t begun to slip. As Coben  explains, blowing the whistle to senior management almost never goes well – bad actors tend to stick together, and a really selfish boss will have taken care to build stronger relationships than you.

All you can really do if it becomes intolerable is to find some way to leave and work elsewhere.  And it’s this simple fact that stops the vampire-people from taking over the whole industry.  Purely self-centred people are an amazing drag to work with, and so over time, they tend to find themselves stuck with lower and lower quality colleagues.  It can take a frustratingly long time for the arc of the universe to bend in the direction of justice, but there’s a reason that Goldman Sachs bankers coined the phrase “long term greedy” to refer to ethical behaviour and teamwork.

So although Coben’s advice is valuable and accurate, it might be a mistake to only consume cynicism.  Rich Handler of Jefferies regularly publishes careers advice, and while he’s unlikely to touch on important subjects like “how do I deal with an MD who’s a bad person?”, it can’t be argued that he’s got on in investment banking a lot further than most.

Elsewhere, a training company called AmplifyME will allow you to spend half an hour pretending to manage a $20m portfolio, followed by half an hour pretending to be a sell-side market maker trying to fill the portfolio’s trades.  The company was set up by two former traders who went to less prestigious “non-target” universities and who wanted to create a way for people that weren’t on the main internship track to demonstrate that they might have some aptitude for the industry.

The simulation runs over a massive Zoom call, and is apparently quite “chaotic”, according to some participants.  As well as interpreting data and making the right market calls, it emphasises communication skills and the ability to get people to give you a good price, just like the real thing.  The company has partnered with Citadel and Morgan Stanley, and they apparently also have an advisory banking simulation, in which candidates take part in a “team based IPO exercise”.  Although this only lasts four hours, and happens during the daytime, so it’s perhaps arguable how faithful a simulation of being a junior investment banker it really is.

Meanwhile …

Banks are still keen to hire from Big Tech – Rohit Dhawan has gone from Amazon Web Services to the newly-created role of “Head of AI” at Lloyds Banking Group in the UK (FT)

Citadel employees who moved from New York to Florida might want to watch their recreational activities while the boss is around.  Ken Griffin has donated millions of dollars and made public statements in support of the campaign against a measure to legalise recreational marijuana consumption in the state.  (Business Insider)

The chronicles of commuter misery continue during the Summer Of Heat On Wall Street, with power disruptions on Amtrak causing some bankers to face three hour journeys to New Jersey and forty minutes on the subway to Prospect Heights. Apparently the wiring of the city’s transit system is no longer able to cope with the height of summer.  (Bloomberg)

And, as is traditional during the hottest and most uncomfortable weeks of the year, the fashion pages once more raise the question of whether shorts will ever be considered acceptable office wear. (WSJ)

As is also traditional at this point in an election year, people are wondering about how to keep political disagreements out of the workplace. (WSJ)

ESG investment has been falling out of favour this year, but the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund remains committed to it.  According to its CEO, former hedge fund manager Nicolai Tangen “We are trying to do all this in order to make more money in the long term”. (Fortune)

The ripples from the reorganisation at Citi have reached Australia, as Alex Cartel, the local head of investment banking, advisory and capital markets, is leaving to go to Rothschild. (AFR)

Another gold medal for bankers – Kristen Faulkner, who first took up the sport seven years ago as a morning activity before her job in venture capital, has won the road cycling in Paris. (Reuters)

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