Former Lehman Brother On The Difference Between Fixed Income Guys And Equity Guys

The culture of the employees, the trading floor [as depicted in Money Never Sleeps]…I thought all that was pretty good, though some of the machines looked funky. And those equity guys were portrayed very accurately, like the lugheads that that know their stories on a couple of [stocks]. At Lehman the difference between equity floor and the fixed income floor was like night and day. It's like the Harvard, MIT crowd in fixed income and then it's like UMass on the equity floor. So many equity guys totally got blind-sided. They didn't understand credit derivatives, and they just were so wrapped up in their own little stories.-- Lawrence McDonald, managing director at Pangea Capital, previously VP of distressed debt and convertible securities trading at Lehman Brothers, and guy for whom the Wall Street sequel was "hard to watch" because it "brought back a lot of bad memories." [TDB]