The Missing Book
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I registered for the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam. It seemed like the best way to get a straight shot of financial knowledge into my brain. I thought I would be able to use my new program to conduct all the of the calculations, and that this exercise would guide the direction of the software.
Reading the CFA materials was supposed to be my therapy. Learning about things makes me feel like I can control them, even while things are actually spinning out of control. They send you a big stack of books. If the truth about capitalism was a known thing, then it ought to be in those books, or so I thought.
In reality the CFA materials contained not one truth, but several. Or maybe they were several attempts to describe the same underlying truth. But there was the truth according to accountants, the truth according to economists, and the truth according to portfolio managers.
I suppose I could talk about each of these and their mutual incompatibilities and how it seemed to undermine the idea of, well, truth.
But the emergence of three or more truths instead of one was not my complaint until later. My problem back then was that there was no truth according to traders. The entire curriculum was developed from the point of view of a buy-side portfolio manager. It had almost nothing at all to say about the trading business. The “sell side,” which consists of banks and brokers, was a total black box to the CFA curriculum.
It was like there was a missing book. There was a whole education about how to run a hedge fund or a mutual fund, but none about how to run a bank, brokerage, or a proprietary trading firm. It really did seem like there was some dark magic keeping information about the internals of our financial system out of books, media, and the popular consciousness.
I realized I was living in a secret world. One that few authors had written about, or accurately. There was a great big blind spot at the center of the capitalist machine, and I was living inside of it. The truth about capitalism must be all around me, and I had managed to acquire privileged access to it.
All I had to do was open my eyes.
Why was I wasting time with these silly books?
