The tragic story of a boy who desperately wanted to work in finance, but never made it

Or, How to Know When to Quit and Start Afresh

This is a post in response to, and in agreement with, this post, where Vedanta talks about how a 4 am call made him quit finance and changed his life forever.

For me, it all started with this video.

It was so freaking cool. I loved it the moment I watched it, which happened to be a few days after it was released on youtube. I knew every single lyric. I probably had a big part to play in it going ‘viral’. Little did I know then the impact it would have on my future life and career decisions.

To help me set the stage, let’s rewind a little bit to my school days. I was, as my teachers described me, ‘the ideal student’. I was good academically. Indians have this fascination with scoring 90% on exams, and anything ranging between 90.0% and 99.9% is considered good. Anything less and you’re destined for failure. I fell within this range all through my school life. No hassles. As a 12 year old I had learnt how to game the system, and by the time I was 16, classmates would call me up and ask me — ‘Chaddi, what’s coming in the exam tomorrow?’. And some of them followed my advice word for word. Add to this a penchant for scoring a bucket load of runs in inter-school and club cricket, and it led to me representing my country of residence at the time in age group competitions. In short, I was a star. Life was good. I ‘earned’ money playing cricket and traveled the world while my classmates slogged their way through SAT and JET classes.

I then got into a University in the UK, not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, apart from wanting to play as much cricket as was feasible in a country where it ‘pisses it down’ everyday. I sort of knew that going to the UK would put an end to my cricketing ambitions, but I had this (very) slight inkling that I might just become the next swashbuckling version of Kevin Pieterson. My father and I, over many drinks on consecutive days after my final school exams, decided that studying finance and accounting opened a number of interesting career paths for me. This was 2005.

Between 2005 and 2007, I studied pretty much everything about finance there was to study without going into the murky depths of quantitative finance. I loved it. The Modigliani-Miller theorems were particularly intriguing. Cut a pizza into as many slices as you want, but it still stays the same size. And probably tastes the same too, though they never mentioned that. Who needs to calculate the precise probability of making money, when you know you can achieve the same outcome by making rough estimations in your head? I was a prop trader at heart. Risk taking came naturally to me. I ran a ‘betting fund’ for 4 years, the sole ‘investor’ being my Dad. We were up 41 months out of 46. Our return on capital made hedge funds look like inept wannabes. ‘A Dad is a banker provided by Nature’.

I attended spring days and information sessions at investment banks, accounting firms, consulting firms and trading houses, and applied for internships everywhere. In the summer of 2007, owing to work permit issues, I managed only to get a one year placement at an accounting firm in their auditing department in London.

Auditing was clearly not what I had in mind…

Not quite the investment banking ‘models and bottles’ gig I was aspiring for. However, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I was given a short, but very varied introduction to the world of high finance. During my year out, I audited insurance companies, hedge funds, private equity funds, banks (two of which don’t exist anymore) and asset managers. Some of these companies had huge buildings for offices, while one hedge fund ran out of the only permanent employee’s bedroom. This was an excellent lens through which to observe the complex functioning of The City of London.

I was just finishing up my one year placement in August 2008 when an American bank announced that it had lost a few billion dollars. I wasn’t worried. ‘Man up, you pussies’. This is finance. Everyone talks in billions. Then, a few days later, another bank announced that it might lose a little more than a few billion dollars. And then a third. And then the system came crashing down. As I entered my final year at University, the world seemed to be shrinking. Employees were being laid off in the thousands. Companies which previously had a graduate intake of 200 now had an intake of 35. Or no intake at all. ‘Surely you should sack the MDs and hire us, it’ll be cheaper?’ we often wondered. The MDs clearly didn’t know anything anyway.

From being reasonably confident of landing a prestigious job at a bank or asset management firm, my life was now in serious WTF territory. Everywhere I applied, they told me they weren’t hiring only after I had pressed the submit button. ‘F%^&ing idiots’, I’d exclaim, as I banged my fists on the table in a computer lab where 30 other students saw the same message pop up on their screens after every completed application.

I had 30 different answers to this particular question on application forms: ‘Give us an example of a situation where you had to overcome an obstacle to achieve your goal’. At one point I wrote all my answers to application questions on a particularly well formatted Word Document, named it ‘The Route to Financial Stardom’, PDF’d it and sold it to 4 desperate class mates. I was hoping to sell 400, but it didn’t happen. At the time, I wasn’t aware of a particularly useful feature — password protection on PDF files — and hence my entrepreneuralism resulted in hundreds of finance hungry grads from Loughborough to LA get hold of my masterpiece for free.

Dream Big, they told me. I was dreaming big, and applying big too. But all I got was rejections. I was really, really keen on working in the City, living in a posh pad in Chelsea, owning a 2 door car, and going on holiday to the most exotic locations around the world. All the freshly minted grads talked of the never-ending parties on company expense, the lavish hotels and the demi-God 23 year old trader who made 200k a year. ‘That’s me’, I would tell myself as I trudged back to my room in the middle of a chilly night after a marathon all-day session of applications, aptitude tests and bad coffee.

Talented applicants were aplenty. ‘Sexy’ finance jobs were far fewer. This meant that unlike the pre-crisis era, only 10% of people got the jobs that they really wanted. And everyone really wanted the same jobs — investment banking, trading or private banking. The rest had to make do with back office, consulting, Big 4, and if you were really unlucky, the corporate world. That was the hierarchy. Plain and simple. Everyone followed it. Start at the most desirable, and work your way down till you find something. If you hit your target, awesome, you were in the top 1%. If you missed, you had to be prepared to spend a couple of years doing the grunt work, then do a Masters or MBA, and have another crack at the top brass.

And so I followed the formula, dotting every i and crossing every t on the path laid down before me. I was determined to do whatever it took to get to the top of the financial world. The level of the hierarchy that chose me after graduation was the Big 4. A whole 3 rungs lower than where I would have liked to start. I spent two years in the Advisory division of a Big 4 firm for 2 years, advising clueless, golf loving pension fund trustees on issues ranging from diversification to investing in carbon offsets. It was unbelievable how billions of pounds were entrusted to a bunch of pensioners who knew as much about investing as I did about building space ships.

In those two years, I must add, I spent inordinate amounts of time studying for the CFA. I was told that the CFA was THE qualification for serious investment professionals. Traders, bankers and equity analysts were all competing with each other to obtain the most desirable qualification in finance in the shortest time possible. The CFA has 3 levels (each level is a 6 hour exam), and if you had the misfortune of failing a level, you did your absolute best to ensure that only your best friend and a whisky bottle knew about it.

As working in advisory at an accounting firm wasn’t going to help me in any way to get to the top of the pay scales, I started observing successful people at asset management firms in London and found two common traits, which I thought would be easy to emulate. I am a great believer in the notion that ‘success leaves clues’. I made the following interesting observations about the top achievers that I studied:

1. They had all studied at either Oxford, Cambridge or LSE. Subject clearly didn’t matter — the portfolio manager at one of London’s best performing equity funds had studied music. Her deputy had a PhD in Dramatics. Awesome twosome.
2. They all got horrendously drunk every Thursday night, and didn’t bother turning up for work on Friday in any state fit to make decisions on behalf of people who had entrusted billions to their care.

So I thought, 2 is easy to do — in fact, I must confess that I did go overboard at times. I only had to keep an eye out on my immediate manager — if he was enjoying himself on a night out, I’d beat him to my desk without any problems the next day. And I did, every single time.

1 however, was a new game for me. Graduates from Oxbridge are an interesting bunch. When they first meet you, they make you feel like you are the most interesting person in the world. As soon as they realize that the University you graduated from is 10 places lower on the league tables, they conveniently remember that their glass is half empty and leave you hanging to get a refill.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, I made it into Cambridge in the summer of 2011 for a Masters in Finance. This surely, I thought to myself, was the golden ticket that was going to get me started on a rapid ascent to the top. All I needed to do was to network actively, stay ahead of most of my peers on the course and wear my most expensive suit all the time. All of which I did with a work ethic that is only matched these days by professional athletes.

After repeating the process that I went through as an undergrad, 146 applications, 64 numerical tests and 13 interviews later, I found a job as a junior trader at a start-up commodities trading house on July 15, 2012. I was told I would have two rounds of interview at their Trafalgar Square office. The first was plain sailing. The three founding partners sat opposite me and drilled me on everything from fixed income to (commodity) futures. When we were done after the most stressful 27 minutes of my life, they said that they’d get back to me if they were interested. How can a first interview last only 27 minutes? I had messed up, I thought. Sure enough, I had nailed it, and I was offered the position. No second interview needed. Boom!

I was so damn excited to tell everyone that I was, finally, a trader.

The plot thickens.

These guys were basically a brotherhood of morons masquerading as commodity traders. On my first day, I realized that no one, I repeat, NO ONE at the company had ever done a commodities trade before. They didn’t even know which markets they wanted to focus on. ‘Should we do biomass? Or iron ore?’ I remember getting on a call on the third day with my Mum while they were out for lunch, and telling her that ‘I think I’ve just made the worst decision of my life’. In essence, these cowboys had lied to me. At interview, they had told me that they had a contract to deliver 20,000 tonnes of fertilizer on a 12 month contract, and that this was making them a steady income. The talks were still in progress when I joined. It turned out, the Turkish company they were ‘talking’ to, was actually a fraudster in Malaysia.

From that day on, things got steadily worse. Not knowing anything about a particular industry can be overcome, but not realizing the need to learn the tricks of the trade only results in professional suicide. The partners didn’t have the slightest urge to learn about commodity trading. The upshot of this was that I quickly became the go to guy for any kind of knowledge related to commodities. These guys did not want to send samples of commodities to prospective customers, because it would save 50 pounds in air freight. It got to the stage where the head trader (the only other employee) and I spent our own money sending samples half way across the world in our quest to make this company’s first trade. 6 months passed and we didn’t execute a single trade. We brought many potential deals to the table. But they were all either ‘too risky’, ‘too small’ or ‘just not worth it’.

In December 2012, a month before my visa was to expire, I called the boss into the office kitchen and told him I’d had enough. I couldn’t ascertain if he was being polite, or a complete dick head, but his only response was ‘sure’. Sure?! There were so many thoughts running through my mind, but only one orifice which would channelize those thoughts into coherent speech. This bottleneck resulted in no words. Only silence. He didn’t even ask if I would serve my notice period, which was part of the contract. We got back to our desks, and by the time I had packed up my stuff (my umbrella and phone charger), he had transferred 17 days’ salary into my bank account.

I got out of office the earliest I had ever done on the 18th of December 2012, and felt an overpowering excitability — the kind that you experience when you realize that there is no path ahead of you, but only a trail to be blazed.

A whole seven years after my infatuation with finance began, I had not made much headway in the field. Seven years is a long time. It was exactly 30% of the time I had spent on this planet. Not that I’ve spent time on other planets. I read a great quote the other day. ‘A business needs 1,000 days before it decides whether to go on or not’. If I was to think of myself as a business, I had spent more than 2,000 days trying my best to ‘make it’, to get to the carrot that was dangling in front of me, almost always just out of reach.

I came back to India in early 2013 to scratch an itch I had felt for a long time- entrepreneurship. I now run a preschool with my Mum, and am on the verge of starting my own digital marketing agency. Both these roles test my entrepreneurial abilities to the max. In the last two years, I’ve learnt more about life, business and myself than I had in the preceding twenty six.

I often wonder what I’d be doing had I stayed in finance. Or if I had been lucky enough to get a job higher up the finance hierarchy. One thing is for certain. I wouldn’t be as excited about the possibilities of tomorrow as I am today. Or as confused, scared, and lonely. It is bloody hard work. Being an employee in finance was like jumping onto a moving train. As long as you could get on, you’d keep moving.

But ten years from now, I want to be the guy the investment bankers come to in order to get a deal done. Let them chase me for the deal, as opposed to me chasing them for the job. One aspect of finance which always irritated me was that you always needed ‘experience’ for the jobs which mattered. Who wants to wait 20 years before you start doing cool stuff?

I’ve hit so many dead ends, and questioned my abilities more often than ever. Growth will not simply ‘come’. I have to go out and get it. I know I need to do a lot more to get to where I want to be. To take the school and the startup to the heights I know they are capable of reaching. Solving this puzzle is turning out to be the most interesting and challenging journey of my life to date.

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P.S: I ended up doing so many numerical tests during my undergraduate days, I started calling myself an ‘expert’ and wrote a book on the art (and science?) of taking numerical tests. This website was built to teach people how to pass those goddamn tests. It makes me proud to say that I still receive messages from students saying the book is ‘the best out there’. But it doesn’t make me feel so good thinking that one of those students is going to end up writing a post similar to this one in 5 years :|