The boardroom is a different kind of beast on Saturdays.
There was trance and house music playing on the speakers. “The Departed” was being played in the floor’s 40+ plasma television screens. In between the “fuck yous” of that movie, there was the occasional announcement that you were listening to DJ Tiesto’s club life. Everyone was wearing casual street clothes.
The reason to come in on Saturdays is to practice pitches, call people at their homes, and also make sure you don’t get stale over the weekend. You have to be sharp at all times when you work at this firm.
Senior brokers usually work in teams of 2. One does all the account opening, the other manages the accounts and does the trading. At around noon, my senior broker that does all the account opening pulled me and a few other guys into the conference room. I haven’t been in the conference room since that first week when I was just a trainee.
It was FREEZING cold. If I’m feeling nervous or uneasy, nothing makes it worse than cold temperature. I walked through a room with plush carpeting, ornate velvet seats, and statues of bulls to remind me that I was on Wall Street. In the conference room, my senior broker made everyone go one by one and say their pitches as he role played as the secretary and the prospect.
He ended up yelling at everyone. Some guys have been there for 2-3 months and they still are pretty bad. I’ve been there for less than a week, and I already sound just as good as them if not better. The only problem is that sometimes I forget what to say next because I think too much about what I need to say. He told us we need to shut everyone out of our lives, don’t give a shit about your friends. They don’t care about you.
His speech sounded almost kind of sad. I felt bad for him that he has been so brainwashed and that no one cared about him when he was broke. Here’s part of what he said.
“Don’t write wood. Don’t get leads that aren’t good. You don’t want to open an account with some guy who’s not qualified and not interested in ideas. God forbid you open an account with him, he’s not going to send you any fucking money. You have to excite them. Listen to what I tell you to do and what I tell you to say, and you’re going to make money. If you don’t listen, you’re not going to make any money. You have to become an animal here to succeed and be sharp everyday you’re here. You have to treat this as a career, not a job. You want a job, you can go down to McDonald’s. Wouldn’t $20, 000, $30, 000 a month change your lives? Raise your hand if you think that’s not going to change your life. You can be a total idiot and make it here. I’ve seen total morons make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. We’re not money managers here, we’re stockbrokers. I don’t know, is anyone here a Harvard MBA grad and can be a money manager? I’ll be the first to admit here that I don’t know shit about stocks, I let ****** handle all of that. “
I met up with my parents on Wall Street to head over to my grandparents in Queens for the day. There’s a lot to think about. I’m starting to think that this place really isn’t going to work for me, money be damned.
Wall Street Broker 