Itera was cruel and unhelpful!? No way! Really?
Everyone in the front office is smart and hard working. I have yet to meet more than a handful of people I would consider stupid. That doesn’t mean everyone is good at the work or makes money, but there isn’t a lot of dead wood.
This is what I have been saying for a long time. It’s like learning to calculate the physics of a race car moving at 200mph and then you get in the car and you find out you don’t even know how to turn it on. So you can calculate triple upside down reverse butterfly spreads but not do a basic P&L forecast? Really? lol? Useless, basically.
This is true. The biggest problem with coming from a poor, uneducated family is not that you don’t have someone to hand you a job, it’s that you don’t even know what you don’t know and have no way to figure it out quickly and efficiently. That was my experience anyway. The biggest difference between the rich and everyone else is that rich people intuitively understand opportunity cost in the way that most of the rest of the population doesn’t.
^i’d say the internet is fixing that problem. back in yours and greenies day, you guys had to go to the library or actually talk face to face with people to find out about careers. Nowadays all the information is a quick google and forum/blog post away. This is also making the employment market incredibly competitive. nearly every candidate is armed with the same knowledge and i’d argue that their social skills and life experience (HS / College Athlete, world travel etc.) is starting to count for more.
For those of you with the background of not having any information or resources and not being exposed to what’s out there only blue collar labor jobs. Don’t worry you guys are that much more self made and have more to be proud about.
I think people from privileged backgrounds are attracted to finance, even after you control for intelligence and ability. When I was growing up, the only career options I knew about were…medicine, and I didn’t know what “i-banking” and “PE” and “buyside” were, until later in college. I saw it in college too, people from wealthier families in many cases had a clear goal of breaking into WS, they were the ones who had internships lined up after their first year in college, which led to a better internship second year, and a BB position by 3rd year. I spent summer after first year working at a pizza shop.
So I do think there is truth to what Wendy was saying.
My dad was a physicist. Physics came naturally to me (up to the relativity and quantum mechanical mathematics) because over years of talking to him - both about his work and the world in general - I picked up how to think about things in a way that made sense to other physicists. Learning this stuff in high school in college was not nearly as difficult for me as it was for my fellow majors, since my intuition on this stuff had been developed over at least a decade before I was being rated and evaluated.
I think it is similar with things like management, finance, and white collar jobs (even blue collar jobs) - when you come from a family that is oriented toward one of these fields, you naturally pick up ways of acting, thinking, and speaking that signal to others that you are ready to work in this field, or at least will learn quickly once exposed.
I think Greenman has a point that if you grew up in a blue collar family, just the idea of how you go about getting a white collar job is a mystery and hard to imagine, even if you have the basic intelligence and drive for it. AfricaFarmer is right that the internet has made it easier, but there are still a lot of behavioral things that go into it as well.
In finance, I’ve often had trouble imagining what it was that people actually knew and did in asset management and other parts of finance. I still have trouble sometimes, because people have strong incentives to mysteriousify their process to create the illusion of secret knowledge and abilities, but consistently - when I’ve actually seen new materials and analysis - I am not that impressed with the level of intelligence that is required. Usually it is just capturing some aspect of an idiosyncratic competitive advantages - personal networks, technological application, one person’s experience with an industry - and trying to build a moat to protect that advantage.
Bromion made a point in one of his posts that part of it is that most investment theses should be graspable quickly. If you can’t figure out if something is a buy or a sell in a day or two, it’s unlikely that 20 days of research is going to uncover anything dramatic that no one else has seen. It’s not so much rocket science as it is discipline… the ability to grind away at all the options over time and allocate risk sensibly so that no one call can blow you out of the water.
When you’re starting out in financial services, the charter helps you get your foot in the door. No one is hiring you just for the charter, but it may certainly help you get the interview. It does not help you to become a good investor, but I also don’t think any other type of formalized eduation does that.
First–you’re assuming a 16 year-old boy knows how to use the internet for something other than looking for naked women and video game cheats.
Second–Wall Street Oasis. 'Nuf said.
I graduated in 2005. We had the internet way back then (shocking but true). Actually I found both of my Wall Street jobs via the internet.
Eh. I don’t think any normal 18-year-old kid from upper middle class family has any idea about finance or how to get an analyst job. However, they do know how to study for SAT, apply to college, and do all these things that, assuming they are good, eventually leads to the job they want. It’s not like companies hire entry level kids that are somehow already market geniuses. Most of these kids don’t know anything; they learn on the job. However, they are in the position to start a finance career because their life circumstances have pushed them down the correct path in the first place.
That’s way off. Upper middle class families have money. Families with money use advisors. Curious teens with an affinity for money management (yes, some of us were there ourselves at one time) get exposure to the world of finance. Their family advisor gets them an internship at their firm…blah blah.
Or better yet, they get a start at an internship in dad’s company. Naturally that experience will help you get a better internship next year.
When they apply to college, they have to know what major to pick though. If you don’t have family/friend influence, it’s tough to sign up for a major and bet 4 years and $100k+ on a subject that you’ve never taken a class in and never met anyone, successful or not, that works in that field.
Eh. I don’t know. Maybe my world is different from all these kids’? My impression from college recruiting was that GS and friends took kids with high GPA and good activities. I’m sure some of these kids had help, but it did not seem to be the distinguishing characteristic of these groups. Looking to my left and right, there is maybe one person here who’s dad was rich. The rest of us just went to good schools. Then again, rich kids go to good schools. So maybe that feeds into it…
Anyway, it seems like a lot of these conclusions are based on anecdotes and conjecture. Do we have any actual data points? How many people here got their first finance internship through their dad’s firm or their family’s FA?
i hate growing up poor
I think this is the crux of the argument. Even if daddy didn’t pull any strings to get you into Harvard or get you an internship with a prestigious firm, the mere fact that you’ve been around successful people all your life, and the fact that you know you should go to Harvard (instead of Hacksaw State) and get a good GPA (instead of “C’s get degrees”) and do activities (not smoking pot and drinking) automatically puts you much further ahead than people like me, who thought “A degree is a degree is a degree. Grades aren’t important. Majors aren’t important. Activities aren’t important. GPA’s aren’t important. All degrees are equal.”
Little did I know that some degrees were more equal than others.
Just to put things into perspective…
When I was 19, and a sophomore in college, I went to Fort Worth to visit a friend who was in the hospital. I went to the elevator (which had four doors), and pushed the “up” button by the door on the far left. A minute later, the door on the far right opened up, and my friend’s mom asked, “Hey, you getting on?”
I really didn’t know what to do. I pushed the button next to the far-left door. I was waiting on THAT elevator door to open. (Seemed logical at the time.) I had never been in a building that had more than one elevator, so I didn’t know what to expect.
I’m sure that you’re all thinking, “Man, what a dumbass.” But that was just the world I lived in. And if you’ve never been exposed to something, there’s not a lot you can do about it. (I’m sure you all knew by 19 how to operate an elevator.)
Just an example of how you learn a lot of things by “osmosis” that you take for granted that everybody ought to know. I’m sure you can extrapolate this to SAT’s and GPA’s somehow.
I disagree with you as well. yea some families have money, but there are not many spots to begin with, and there are always families with more money. You need a subtantial amount of wealth beyond just “upper middle class” to really have the “class” benefit where someoen gets hired through favors. There are always friends/family that get people in, but that’s hardly the norm that happens.
the vast majority of kids I’ve seen that “made it” just worked hard in school, got to a top program, and just kept working hard with internships/grades. and landed the job.