I don’t have to tell you that things on Wall Street have been prettay prettay prettay bad of late. You financial services hacks of the world are delicate flowers and right now, your ecosystem is being is being disrupted. You’re on edge and most of the time, at any given moment, you could easily see yourself going circus freak crazy on someone and maybe like killing a man in cold blood or something. Unfortunately this sort of behavior is still for the most part frowned upon at most firms on Wall Street (obviously you’ve got your exceptions- MWhitney Associates, DoubleLine, etc). You could go to some gym and do a little sparring in the ring but what you really want is a place where people will understand. Where they’ll get what you’re about. Enter: The Dungeon.
A black eye or row of stitches may grace John Cholish’s face when he meets with wealth-management clients at Merrill Lynch & Co. Those injuries occur after Cholish, 26, leaves his midtown Manhattan office and heads for the gym. Cholish and his roommate, Erik Owings, also a professional fighter, converted the top level of their duplex apartment on the Upper East Side into a gym, where Byrne sometimes brings Wall Street colleagues to work out.
“It’s the dungeon of pain,” said Brian Peganoff, an assistant vice president in corporate cash management at Deutsche Bank. Peganoff, 27, learned tae kwon do as a child and started boxing as a workout while attending Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He began jiu-jitsu about two years ago.
A couple weeks ago, we brought to your attention Lloyd Blankfein’s face. It’d been on display at the Financial Crisis Inquiry, in all it’s whatchu talkin about Willis/you people are idiots/I could kill you and nobody would know about it glory. The stink eye, the scrunched face, glaring like nobody’s business at anyone who happened to be speaking or thinking things at the time. It was so ravishing, so utterly mesmerizing that we suggested that Goldman institute the Lloyd Cam so that we might enjoy that mug any time we pleased. It’s under consideration. In the meantime, it appears that come June, we’re going to have the opportunity to soak up twice the love/hate. At left, Jonathan Blankfein, son of LB, Harvard Class of 2010 and incoming Goldman analyst. He doesn’t do it exactly like dad but everybody needs to put their own special take on things. He’s already got a Bloomberg account so take a peak and make him the most viewed today!
The American Securitization Forum conference in Vegas used to be quite the party scene, with every bank, monoline (remember them?) and institution outdoing each other in who would throw the most amazing bacchanal. This year, not so much. Also, they moved the venue to the outskirts of DC- where, as a source said, “there really is nothing to do.”
“As a consequence, unlike Vegas where in between sessions you could hang out in bars or go see a ‘show,’ you have nothing to do except go to the damn sessions. On the upside, they are much more well attended than they ever were in Vegas.”
Been interested in getting invested in the hedge fund game but after shopping around various firms not quite found the right fit? Having some trouble swinging the minimum at LaBeouf Capital Management? Great news! A can’t-lose opportunity has come along. Litigator Sarah Bernett has founded hedge fund Bernett Diversified Global Fund, catering to “low- and middle income individuals.” Here are the deets:
* Minimum investment: $1,000
Galleon informant (though not according to his ex-wife) David Slaine has accused of insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC claims Slaine, who can bench 400 pounds and once punchslapped his boss during a heated discussion in an Equinox steam room, made $500,000 from a tip he received from a former UBS exec (Mitchel Guttenberg, who’s currently in prison). I need to know Elyse Slaine’s thoughts on the matter before I can form an opinion on this one. E- call, email or leave it in the comments.
The Volck-Man, who will testify later today before the Senate Banking Committee on his prop trading rule, would first and foremost like everyone to understand that the rule is part of a broader structural reform, which he summarizes elegantly this way: The idea is that a designated agency be provided authority to intervene and take control of a major financial institution on the brink of failure. The mandate is to arrange an orderly liquidation or merger. In other words, euthanasia not a rescue.
Not judging, and, actually, maybe this makes the Team SEC look a little better than before? It’s not that they were deaf/dumb/stupid, they were just otherwise occupied/had their hands full? Don’t think I’m reaching here.
The work computer of one regional supervisor for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed more than 1,800 attempts to look up pornography in a 17-day span: “It was kind of distraction per se,” he later told investigators.
But he wasn’t alone. More than two dozen SEC employees and contractors over roughly the past two years have faced internal investigations after they were caught viewing pornography on their government computers, according to records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and other public documents.
David Einhorn favors stuffed animals. George Soros goes with the Pez dispensers. Jeffery Gundlach, his most prized dildos. What sort of good luck charms money managers keep in their office (along the windowsill or around their monitors but always within arm’s reach) might not seem that important but its these little garden gnome-type figures who watch over things, and who some of the most powerful investors in the world turn to when times get tough. Who helped Cliff Asness survive the quant meltdown of ’07 (and the mutual fund hiccups of the future)? The answer may not surprise you. From Scott Patterson’s The Quants:
I don’t have to tell you that things on Wall Street have been prettay prettay prettay bad of late. You financial services hacks of the world are delicate flowers and right now, your ecosystem is being is being disrupted. You’re on edge and most of the time, at any given moment, you could easily see yourself going circus freak crazy on someone and maybe like killing a man in cold blood or something. Unfortunately this sort of behavior is still for the most part frowned upon at most firms on Wall Street (obviously you’ve got your exceptions- MWhitney Associates, DoubleLine, etc). You could go to some gym and do a little sparring in the ring but what you really want is a place where people will understand. Where they’ll get what you’re about. Enter: The Dungeon.
