I got the title of "Investment Associate" but deep down I think i'm an Analyst at best?

REPESailor2020:

I guess developing a new building or investing in a new company, or infrastructure, or a new division of a company, or an M&A transaction all feels a lot like a "new product".

Some products developed in past couple of decades: junk bonds, poison pills, mortgage backed securities, etc etc etc

Lets not forget the 1970s. Fucking derivatives. They had no clue what they were getting into. Or maybe they did.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilylambert/2011/01/17/the-man-who-gave-u…

"A statue of Ceres, goddess of grain

Edmund “Eddie” O’Connor passed away early on Jan. 17, 2011 at age 85. If you haven’t heard of him before, that’s as he wanted it. O’Connor was an intensely private man, a trader primarily of soybeans. But he also was one of the men who invented modern-day derivatives.

Except for the time he left to fly in a plane during the Second World War, O’Connor was in and around his hometown. He worked as an usher at sporting events all over the city (he grew up just north of Madison Avenue, the dividing line, so he was a Cubs fan) and worked as a conductor on the elevated train. He graduated from law school in 1950 when, much like now, the economy didn’t have room for more lawyers. He became an insurance adjustor but then found the Chicago Board of Trade, long before it became part of what's now the publicly-traded exchange company CME Group.

The Board was widely known as an Irish trading club, a characterization O'Connor disputed because there were people who weren’t Irish. As for him, he was an outsider because he was a West Sider rather than a South Sider. He had a cousin at the Board who was a broker for firms that used futures to hedge, to lock in prices. But Eddie didn’t have enough connections to be a broker himself so he joined the group of people who used futures to speculate, to take on risk that others didn’t want. O’Connor joined the club in 1952 and stood in an octagonal pit, where men traded soybean futures with shouts and hand signals. Many others started as clerks and worked their way up, but he started as a trader. He became a big one and came close to bankruptcy once, but he told me to not use the word “bet” in my book. “Trading and betting are different things. Bettors didn’t last long,” he said.

He, however, did last. He brought on his younger brother, Billy, and they became a daring duo. They started a clearing firm, in the days when that took $25,000 rather than millions of dollars. With that firm, they cleared (guaranteed) other members’ trades. Eddie wove himself into the fabric of the exchange, serving on committees and then the board of directors.

The Board of Trade was a stick-to-your-knitting kind of place, and O’Connor shook things up. One of the first things he did was introduce electronic quote boards to the old-fashioned trading floor, where prices had for decades been posted in chalk. That may or may not have been because some of the “board markers” holding chalk had trouble staying sober. I’ll tell you this much: O’Connor didn't want the truth in my book. He wasn’t the kind to spill secrets, even about people long gone.

He shook things up further in 1973, when he helped open the Chicago Board Options Exchange, created to give Board of Trade men something to do when the grain markets were slow. He didn’t pull this off himself, but it was his idea and it wouldn’t have happened without him. When the traders he knew were reluctant to trade this complicated new product, he and Billy formed another clearing firm and provided backing and support. “It was a little scary,” he said. “We didn’t know if the concept would fly, and we didn’t have much money.” But it worked so well that they had more business than they could handle. They sold their firm in 1979, and it’s now part of Goldman Sachs.

Eddie happily returned to the soybean pit, just in time to make a mint in the 1970s commodities explosion. How much did he make, on this and other ventures? Good luck finding out. He became very rich, that’s safe to say. I had no way of confirming his net worth, and he wasn’t about to help.

He said his original goals were modest. “The idea that I always had when I first joined was to provide a living for myself and my wife, who I hoped to acquire in a short period of time.” He married in 1955. He had five children, all of whom followed him into the trading industry in one way or another. While his brother Billy became famous for, among other things, crashing three different moving vehicles (a plane, car and boat) in less than 24 hours. Eddie was more subdued. He was a devoted golf player. I told one person that when I asked Eddie about trading, he made it sound boring. I was told this: “Eddie O’Connor is boring by design. He won’t tell you half of what he knows. It’s like the code. He won’t say names, dates, places.”

To be sure, O’Connor had his secrets. I heard a rumor that he squeezed the soybean oil market at one point, and he admitted he got a 90-day suspension for trading after the closing bell. But frankly, whatever illicit fun he had pales in importance to what he accomplished.

O’Connor and his colleagues, in starting the options exchange, opened a door to securities traders and to Wall Street, something for which some people in Chicago never forgave him. He started an options trading firm, which he sold to Swiss Bank Corp. (now UBS) and which Eddie considered the first derivatives firm in the country. Futures are derivatives, and the Board’s rival Chicago Mercantile Exchange had been rolling out new futures contracts. But with stock options, the Securities and Exchange Commission blessed the first derivative of the securities world. That led to an explosion of them.

One day in the 1980s O'Connor read in the Wall Street Journal that someone had split a bond in two pieces to be traded separately. “Then it suddenly dawned on me what was happening,” he told me last year. “Derivatives began to proliferate. It’s completely out of control, really. When you look at what happened with the mortgage markets, they were creating derivatives that were based upon garbage.”

O’Connor, however, came from a world where neighbors were responsible, people took risk with a purpose, and risk-takers faced consequences. He created a financial product that could be used to manage risk, and he created it for a world where men traded, they didn’t bet. He cut one of our conversations short, telling me that we’d talked for an hour and he had to get back to work. Until recently, Eddie O’Connor traded from a small office in suburban Chicago that he shared with one of his sons and a son-in-law. He closed out a corn position in late October, before he had an accident that sent him to the hospital. He was a trader to the end."