This is a rambling, anonymous, first-person account of one guy talking his way out of a job at Morgan Stanley. It starts with him finding some MS chick’s cell in a cab, reading the text messages between her and her married boss (with whom she was having an affair), returning the phone, asking to send a resume, interviewing, not being patient enough to wait and hear he got the job, cursing the adulteress out over email and being told to seek professional help. It’s oddly hypnotic. If you’ve ever been in a similar situation, do share. [PRR]
- Use the Bloomberg command
NH BLG_DEALBREAKER <GO>
to access Dealbreaker -
You know what they say: You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your financial planner. Or something like that. One of the great things of being in charge of your money is choosing who (if anyone) will help you manage it. The choice isn’t always an easy one. How will you know that your planner is reputable and trustworthy?
These five red flags may be good indications of whether the financial planner sitting across from you is someone you should trust with your money. LearnVest Planning also provides an innovative 7-step program for your money where you work one-on-one with a financial planner. To see if this program is right for you, start with a free financial consultation.
1. She Isn’t Certified
“There are a lot of good planners out there who aren’t Certified Financial Panners™,” says Samantha Vient, CFP®, of LearnVest Planning Services. “However, CFPs® are required to adhere to the CFP® Board’s standards of professional conduct.We believe it’s always a good idea to work with someone who has the CFP® designation, which is issued after completing a CFP® Board-approved personal financial planning curriculum, passing a rigorous exam issued by the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, meeting experience requirements and passing an ethics and background check.
2. He Offers to Manage Your Money for “Free”
Financial planners are usually paid in one of two ways: Either through fee-only, which can be a set fee, hourly, retainer or a percentage of the assets they manage for you, or through commission, which means the planner is paid each time he buys or sells an investment.Fee-only payment structures can be more desirable to some clients, as there’s no financial incentive based on assets under management for a planner to buy or sell, whereas working on commission encourages planners to make trades, rather than solely look out for your best interest—called a “fiduciary” duty. (You want to be sure that the planner you choose is a fiduciary.)
LearnVest Planning Services provides the services of fee-only Certified Financial Planners™. Get started for free with a 15-minute financial consultation.
3. She Says She Outperforms the Market
“If a financial planner tells you that she can outperform the market, that’s a major red flag,” Vient explains. “In fact, due to government regulations, it’s illegal to advertise statements that promise a specific return.”Outperforming the market—that is, getting better investment returns than the market average—is extremely difficult to do consistently, and requires taking a lot of risks with your investments. It’s rare to find a financial planner who can consistently outperform the market—and results are never guaranteed. Either way, in the pursuit of these high returns, she’ll be exposing your investments to much higher risk than you may be comfortable with.
Instead, look for a CFP® who, when looking at your portfolio, can advise on proper asset allocation based on your risk tolerance and time horizon, as well as through economic ups and downs.
4. She Doesn’t Ask About Your Financial Goals
“Your planner isn’t just there to crunch the numbers,” Vient advises. “She’s helping you make a plan for your money and your life. You should be looking for someone who has similar values to you.”Ideally, you’ll likely want to work with someone who is in a similar life stage. Are you a parent? A planner with children may be better able to understand your need to save for college. Does your CFP® have a specialty? Some planners have an area of expertise, like insurance, estate planning, divorce or retirement—a fact you might want to consider if that’s a particular need of yours.
When meeting a potential planner, remember that you’re allowed to ask questions about their experience and priorities: “Do you think it’s more important to save for retirement or pay off debt? How do you feel about supporting kids through college? How do you mitigate investment risk as your clients get older?”
The choices you make with your money are intensely personal. The person who helps you make these choices should be able to understand and accept your financial priorities, and help you use your money to meet them.
5. His Management Style Makes You Uncomfortable
Financial planners can manage your money for you or manage your money with you. As different people have different needs when it comes to money management, there is no right way to work with a planner—it’s up to you to decide how hands-on you want him to be.
When you sign on with a financial planner, there will be a written agreement of how the two of you will manage your money. Read this carefully, and ask questions if you’re unsure about anything. Are you signing your accounts over to this planner? Will he check in with you before making a trade, or when rebalancing your accounts? If you’re uncomfortable with anything in the agreement, bring it up immediately.Learn more about LearnVest Planning and our financial planners by visiting learnvest.com. To book your free consultation today, email FA_Support@learnvest.com or complete your request online.
LearnVest Planning Services is a registered investment adviser. The opinions expressed in this article are that of LearnVest Planning Services, a registered investment adviser. The advice provided may not be suitable for your individual situation and you should discuss your situation with a financial professional.
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it was me!!!
-self laothing MS reject
reading that made me happy not to be that guy.
what a trainwreck…
slore!
Look out kid, it’s something you did – god knows when, but you’re doing it again. You better duck down the alley way, looking for a new friend – the man in the coon-skin cap, by the big pen. Wants eleven dollar bills, but you only got ten.
-Adam “17+ Screens” Sender
who is Ariel in CDS and does his wife know now?
If I was this emotional, I would have killed myself twice already in December… and it’s an up month.
- Guy who needs a negative beta to alpha this month
Blah-blah-blah… MS is hiring?!
“[B]ringing the world economy in 2008″ is the new killing it.
Other than that, I have little to no concern.
People who use that many “like”s and run-on sentences should be shot.
Link address is NSFW.
What a pussy does this guy understand leverage at all? if i was him i would tell that bitch i would let everyone know she is banging her married boss. I bet she would have STFU and let him get hired
co-signed
if it were matt taibbi (or another fake) it would be a lot more outrageous.
To avoid the Ayatollah:
on valentine’s day, me and my ex-girlfriend emily went to dinner at this restaurant in williamsburg and then after dinner we took a cab home and as we’re going over the williamsburg bridge in the cab, she says she feels something and reaches into the crevice in between the back of the seat and the seat itself and pulls out a cell phone
and the cell phone is a big blocky plastic flip phone. the company Panasonic makes a laptop called the Panasonic Toughbook that is designed to withstand water and impact, it looks like a tiny hard plastic suitcase, and this cell phone was like the cell phone version of that laptop. emily suggests that we give it to the cab driver for him to return it and i say that we should like at least go through the text messages first
so we read all the text messages and guess that it is a man’s cell phone based on the cell phone itself and some of the messages, there are some steamy text exchanges with someone named Ariel whose gender is impossible to determine from the name and the messages. eventually the cab drops us off and we decide to not give the phone to the cab driver because i figure i can probably return it and get a reward. i text Ariel, “what is the email address of the owner of this phone” and they text back a female name @ “morganstanley.com” (which is a big investment bank)
so i send an email to that e-mail address that says “hey i found your phone in a cab and i want to return it, how do i do that” and then the next morning i get an e-mail that says like “hey thank you so much!!!” and this woman tells me where she lives and also asks if i want her to pick it up from where i live
and i say “no it’s okay, i can return the phone because i will actually be in your neighborhood later today and can drop it off with you”
and then we set up a time to meet at her building, and then later that day i have lunch in Williamsburg and walk over to this woman’s building and buzz her apartment and wait like 30 seconds and then she comes outside and looks around for me and i hold up the cell phone to identify myself and she walks over to me and she is smiling. she is blonde and in her early 30s i think, and i say “hey i’m david” because it seemed appropriate to sort of introduce myself, and i hand her the phone and she hands me a box of cookies, like the kind of cookies that look fancy but you can get them from the deli, and i appreciate the gesture even though you can get the cookies from the deli, and she thanks me a lot
and then i say “ummmm so me and my girlfriend went through all your text messages and we have some questions” and part of me expected her to freak out and be like “how could you invade my privacy like that??!?!” and then i would have been like “no come on, i am returning your phone like thereby saving you hundreds of dollars and hours of wasted time, it’s like the least i can expect in return you know?” but then she did what i thought was the reasonable thing, which was to laugh and say that she would have done the same thing and then she says “okay what do you wanna know?” and i say “is Ariel a man or a woman and what is your relationship to them, and also who is Melanie and why are you guys fighting?”
and she tells me that Ariel is her boss and they have been seeing each other secretly because he is married and also it is against company policy for someone to be dating their boss, and melanie is her friend who she is just having an ordinary friend fight with that is not interesting
and then i say “okay cool, that’s it i guess” and then she thanks me again and we start to walk away from each other and then i work up my courage and turn around and say “no wait!” and she turns around and gives me like a puzzled look and i say “your email address is @ morgan stanley — is that where you work?” and she nods and i say “okay i just graduated from school with a degree in economics and i currently have a shitty job, your firm isn’t hiring is it?”
and she thinks for a second, i guess she is considering how someone who is asking for a job knows that she is sleeping with her married boss, but it’s the same person who returned her cell phone, and then she says “no actually we are looking for someone… why don’t you send me your resume and i’ll look it over” and i must be smiling like a maniac and i thank her and walk back over the bridge to manhattan
and then as soon as i get home i send her my resume and three days later she emails me back to come in for an interview and sends me some literature about the bank and the job and her division, which actually happens to be Credit Default Swap trading, which is one of security instruments that is most blamed for bringing the world economy in 2008
essentially what a credit default swap is is a bet that someone else will default on their loans, but not like another person — like a corporation or a country. whenever you read in the news that a country is facing a “sovereign debt crisis” it means that a country doesn’t think it will be able to pay back its loans, which is a terrifying thing if you live in that country and for people around the world, and people buy and sell Credit Default Swaps on the possibility that the country will default on its debt. originally the swaps were meant to be insurance, so if you had loaned greece $100 million you could take out $100 million of insurance in the form of credit default swaps, and if Greece defaulted you could at least get something back, but now people buy trillions of dollars of credit default protection for debt they don’t own, which may or may not be an inherently dangerous thing for the world economy. so anyway that’s what i wanted to do
and i read all the literature she sent me, and all the stuff about credit default swaps that i could find, and bought a suit, i hadn’t bought a suit in years, and i went in for the interview and i thought it went really well. they told me how much the job paid and it was crazy, like i didn’t even know they paid people out of college that much anymore. during the interview i met her boss Ariel and didn’t mention that i knew about their affair, i suspect she mentioned it, and he was nice to me but a little cold. and then as i was leaving the interview he said they would get back to me soon if they decided to hire me, and when i got home i sent her a heartfelt thank you email and asked when i could expect to hear from them about the position because i’d forgotten to ask about it during the interview
and then a week went by and nothing happened, no response to my email or other communication and i started to think they decided they didn’t like me and i wouldn’t get the job, but i wanted to make sure, so i sent another e-mail thanking the woman for the interview and reiterating my interest in the position and again asking when i might expect to hear about whether or not i was hired. i told her i understood if i wasn’t the right candidate, i know i don’t look like what you’d expect a Credit Default Swap Junior Analyst at a major investment bank to look like, but i also thought i would be great for the job, but i would prefer not to be kept in suspense about it. it sounds weird to say that i sent that email to an interviewer, but my email was friendly and not weird. i even had a friend proofread it for unnecessary weirdness and she said it was fine
and then another week passed and i was despondent and i knew they had decided not to hire me. i thought, like, “i returned this woman’s cell phone, the least she could do is send me back an email to say i didn’t get this job so i could at least stop stressing about it constantly” because i was having trouble sleeping and also my relationship was imploding at the time and i felt hopeless about ever finding a job that didn’t make me dread getting out of bed in the morning, so it was a pretty low time for dave, you know, and then finally after two and a half weeks without any communication since the interview i sat at my desk at my current job and wrote an email on my blackberry to the woman and sent it and didn’t even proofread it
and as i am writing this i just reread that email and when i started writing this story i thought the highlight of it was gonna be that email copied and pasted, but i can’t put it in because it is too embarrassing and sad, and thinking about including that email in this is like when you break up with someone and then you want people to think you’re over them and maybe you even think you are over them, so you talk about them to your friends and then you start getting emotional and you’re thinking like “man i am definitely not over this yet”
but i will paraphrase the email with a Lil Wayne lyric which is “throw dirt on me and grow a wildflower” but it had some curses in it and also said some stuff about how maybe trading Credit Default Swaps and Collateralized Debt Obligations and other asset-backed securities had just ruined millions of people’s lives
and then she emailed me back five minutes later and her email said three things: the first one was “seek help” and the second one was “thank god you showed your true colors before we hired you” and then the third one was a series of copied and pasted emails between the woman and the human resources department indicating that they had hired me and she had sent my information to human resources and human resources was supposed to call me later that day to tell me what the next steps were, like coming in and signing papers. i would have started in three weeks. a month after that i started writing PRR because i was bored at work
and i walked home from work that day and listened to Fuck Tha World by Lil Wayne and cried on the phone to my dad who said i needed to go to law school so stuff like this wouldn’t happen to me anymore, but he wasn’t angry or disappointed with me, even though he has high expectations for my life in terms of return on investment, he said she should have emailed me back when i asked when i was supposed to hear back, and i thought that was uncharacteristically understanding of him
and sometimes when i’m at work now i think about how my life would be different if i hadn’t sent that email, like how i would be able to afford nicer shit and have a secure future. and i think maybe the only way i can eventually feel good about not getting that job is if i do something even more fulfilling or more lucrative with my life, you know, so wish me luck i guess. in Fuck Tha World, Lil Wayne says “i try to forget about it and just stand strong / but if everything was cool i wouldn’t write this damn song / fuck tha world”
TLDR.
Let me correct my last statement. Waaaaaaaaaay TLDR.
Err… my bad. Didn’t see what you did there. Was so long it temporarily blinded me. Thank you, and once again, my apologies.
There is an Ariel in FID, and he’s def banging one of his underlings. This is real.
There is an Ariel in FID, and he’s def banging one of his underlings. This is real.
“(which is a big investment bank)” is the best part
he knows his audience, I guess
Quit imitating Hitler and become creative on your own.
Why would someone’s parents name their kid after the radio antenna on a car?
Don’t worry, HR will give the guy a pass. He makes a lot of buckeroos. They’ll tell him the next time he tags an underling make sure she’s not totally retarded and leaves her phone lying around with steamy sex messages. On second thought, why is the married dude running around with a phone full of steamy sex messages from his “secret” mistress?
Idiot!
how is it in any way nsfw?
Are you from Bangalore office or smth?
hearing there is no CDS trader named ariel at MS
hearing you don’t have access do the MS directory which would show that yeah, there is a CDS trader named ariel at MS.
“and bought a suit, i hadn’t bought a suit in years”
IE I’m a white trash loser
I can believe her entertaining him with a, “Sure, send me your resume…” but I sincerely doubt she would have actually Fw the loser’s resume. I’m calling BS.
“dad who said i needed to go to law school so stuff like this wouldn’t happen to me anymore”
Tier 4 law school is the NKI.
confirmed
“IE I’m a white trash loser ”
you’re kind of an idiot, you know that? not defending the guy, but he could have very well been some privileged white boy who went did liberal arts undergrad and had no corporate job after. hence, no need to buy a new suit.
“i say ‘hey i’m david’ because it seemed appropriate to sort of introduce myself, and i hand her the phone and she hands me a box of cookies, like the kind of cookies that look fancy but you can get them from the deli, and i appreciate the gesture even though you can get the cookies from the deli, and she thanks me a lot”
Hypnotic is right.
Never been to a country club, a restaurant that required a jacket, a sorority formal, a wedding, interviews, job fair during undergrad, prom, debutante, ANYTHING recently where he had to be in a suit = pathetic loser
Thought Ariel was some kind of Disney princess? Poor asshole.
He must be hot though. Wound not be OK banging a guy with that name.
Hey!!
-Kate Gosselin
You would wear a tuxedo or a blazer to most of that shit anyways. I didn’t get a suit until right before I started SA, yet I had a tuxedo and blazers.
You forgot, “Oh sure…like ‘he’ went to Harvard!!…..”
he should have said “i will summarize the email with the lil wayne lyric…” A paraphrase would be significantly longer.
“i felt hopeless about ever finding a job that didn’t make me dread getting out of bed in the morning”
You know, because CDS is such a fun and easy-going job
is “wound” a synonym for “pussy”, and are you speaking ebonics?
Dear Diary,
Sitting here hugging my teddy bear and listening to gangster rap and like I’m crying cuz like I think the world hates me and junk and its just not fair and all I did was like meddle – just a little bit- in someone elses business and like they shoulda gave me that job cause I’m smart and stuff and I’m just like WHY DOES GOD HATE ME …
It will cause your intelligence to shrivel up and cry.
Models and bottles, models and bottles.
by an IB..
Complete BS. This guy isn’t articulate enough to be hired as a Chinese delivery guy, never mind an IB.
you’re the tool for going to a debutante ball in a business suit, get a tailcoat n00b
Lil Wayne is the new Lil Blankfein
I was skeptical reading this, as his interview process seemed as realistic as they depict high school party scenes in movies (everyone dancing in unison drinking out of red solo cups). I was wondering how a 30-something hipster could throw on an urban outfitters skinny tie and a pair of Wallabees and walk into an interview like the bassist from vampire weekend and expect to get a job. He was a likable character and I enjoyed his writing so I will just take it for what it’s worth. Either this is just an entry for the bushwick essay contest or Matt Taibbi is bored as shit
IUrIYE Major thankies for the article.Really looking forward to read more. Fantastic.
A round of applause for your blog.Really looking forward to read more. Cool.
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