I am surrounded by MORONS

badam — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:03:59 -0400

Do you know that rap song "The Whistle Song" by Juelz Santana? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r2A6RkJpQI

All day this week I've had a bunch of mainly Associates around me singing "EV over EBITDA, EV over EBITDA" to the opening line "There it go baby don't stop now, there it go baby don't stop now"; "girl you make my whistle blow" has become "man you make my profit grow", and it gets worse. And they sing this crap on repeat, day in day out.

Its as bad as it sounds.

What will be the next hot area in Markets?

badam — Sun, 18 May 2008 17:38:19 -0400

So over 2004-07 credit seemed to be the hot area of Financial Markets, lots of the most hardcore grads running to the Structured Credit Trading desks playing with CDOs and ABS', until that all blew up in their face.

Right now the hot area seems to be commodities, the ever-soaring oil price being a daily headline, with precious metals also a sensible investment in these markets.

What do you think will be the hot desks/areas of the future? Will exotic credit trading make a comeback in 5yrs, with lessons learnt from the subprime bubble? Will a new area within derivatives take centre stage?

Cash traders & sales-traders - what's the point?

badam — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:03:50 -0400

Why would any client who wants to buy/sell a liquid asset (say a stock for example) by ringing up a sales-trader, who punches the numbers into their screen and clicks enter (far too frequently making an error in this process), and then having a trader work the deal in blocks, paying 10-20bps commission, when you can do the entire thing yourself using DMA - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Marke

Trader pay, London - £200k+ age 24

badam — Fri, 02 May 2008 06:08:18 -0400

This was on the eFinancialNews site, London trader (graduated from Cambridge 2004), lives with his lawyer gf, has paid off most of a £1.2m mortgage.

£1 = $2 roughly, clearly those $2 in NYC stretch further than £1 in London, but the pay (particularly base) seems astronomical compared to NYC (although being a solicitor in London pays hugely less than a corporate attorney in NYC) -

Why would shareholders pay anywhere near the DCF fair value of a company?

badam — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:40:29 -0400

Valuing a company by the estimates discounted sum of its future cashflows may make sense if you're going to acquire the whole company.

Why does everyone hate Deutsche Bank?

badam — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:49:02 -0400

I've seen on this forum and several others, Deutsche Bank really doesn't seem that well regarded by you guys. Regarded as a 2nd tier bank, outside the top 10, and ommitted from "top bank" lists.

Why? Some people in the know consider it one of the world's top firms, and their number 1-2 choice for certain products.