Morale on the sell-side

Morale is fine as long as you're making money and don't work at UBS. Don't believe everything you see on TV.

It's not great, more and more people being laid off, and can't imagine comp is going to be great with the performances on the street this year. That said, in the macro world the buy-side has been just as bad really, seems to me as there might be a good amount of consolidation.

Sell-side is dismal. Bitching with buy-side over price on the third and fourth decimal, but some sales guys are pulling in money like it's 2007. Word travels fast on the street if a salesman throws out good investment cases. Those who used to have 10-20 good clients now have 20-50, going to see a few old farts burning up soon. Second Revsly on the consolidation part.

is this mostly S&T in NYC? or bankers across the country, even in smaller cities?

Interesting color. In the equity long/short world, people are exhausted after a grinding year and grumbling about how hard it is to make money, but my sense is that sentiment is still better than our macro brethren, or the sell-side. The Mark Dow piece from a couple months ago on macro funds was pretty interesting, returns have been pretty poor (thought there are always exceptions), and I would imagine that LPs might be growing impatient after several soft years. It doesn't seem like the current environment (choppy, rangebound, policy dependent) will transition to something more constructive anytime soon, so I wonder what kind of shakeout could occur in that space. Quickly frankly in the equity world we naturally make money on the beta given the ongoing central bank reflation, but it feels harder and harder to grind out any alpha, there just seems to be too much money chasing returns everywhere. I'm not sure where this all goes, but it definitely is concerning.

Wow gammaovertheta, what bank do you work at?! Morale is appalling everywhere, why- its obvious

Crap returns : March bonus time is (on a bullish scenario) going to be 10% worse than last year, while pay cuts loom over the horizon.To top that off, the cost of living is going up while those with children entering the job market are finding that their kids are all but locked out. So on top of earning less, they are spending more - while working as hard if not harder than last year.

No prospects: Money has left the system, never to come back. Quite a few business lines pre 2007 will not see any kind of action on a similar scale for the next 5 years at least. Every banker pidgeonholed into these endevours faces oblivion. Clients are also now paying a lot less for your services while your annual xmas gift giving has been shot down by overzealous compliance teams.

No job security: Most banks have resorted to quarerly culls which, In london, have left the front office headcount 60% of the size it was in 2007. People are being thrown out of the city with little to no exit opportunities off the back of a credit crisis which very well left them overleveraged.

No expansion: Companies such as UBS are retreating from all capital intensive operations and continuous capital raisings are occurring all round the city. Have a great idea for a new bizo line, keep it to yourself!

Unfortunately, all of these things have made it a rather sour place to work and speaking to the sell side, I get the same story from a tonne of institutions.

Oblivion aside, having a great day - already taken down three green teas and a rather nice soup for lunch ;-)

Morale is not appalling everywhere I'd say that's a bit doom and gloom.

Morale at my bank is good, but muted. We are just thankful to be with our firm. We've done well this year, but we all know that comp will be down from where it could be.

We are not worried about layoffs, but we are all trying to generate as much revenue as possible, given the market. Everyone seems to be working hard, calling clients, initiating on new companies, etc. Slowdive was right on the mark: this year has definitely been a grind.

Have those of you in FICC noticed a big gap in morale between firms like GS/JPM versus MS/CS?

I'm in a MM bank.