The next generation of stock analysts

 

I dreamed I worked at a very old, decrepit dinosaur of a financial firm. Their old four story walk up building was in a high growth district and looked out of place among the newer architectural designs, despite having undergone a facelift or two over the millennia. I think the last one was done in the art deco days, since the corners all had a rounded appearance, like a 50s era toaster or refrigerator/freezer.

Inside, it was business as usual. Phone calls were being made from a boiler room. Not quite a literal boiler room, but the exposed plumbing and electrical conduit did give the place an industrial atmosphere. I think the hot water pipes actually did provide the building with heat, although the management seemingly generated plenty of that with their incendiary motivational speeches. 

"Leads are for closers," Walter Klein intoned the famous Glengarry Glen Ross speech. "So you losers won't be getting any of them. You will be making cold calls and developing fresh leads for me."

We were each handed a copy of the financial section of the newspaper and a rotary telephone. With only these two tools, we were supposed to enlarge the company portfolio by dialing up random people and picking stocks from the paper to sell to them. We were like bookie pimps, lining up sure-fire bets for the unwitting, ever gullible, greedy public. 

Fishing for greed in a sea of greed wasn't too hard, and some of our picks actually paid off. We operated under the Spaghetti-Wall/Monkey-Typewriter Theorem: throw enough spaghetti at a wall and furnish enough monkeys with typeriters, and you will eventually have a rose colored fresco or produce the Magna Carta, provided the monkeys don't get distracted picking the bits of spaghetti off the wall instead of banging away on their typewriters. (Note to self: for future versions of this metaphorical experiment, keep the monkeys away from the spaghetti.)

It was my first day on the job, and I didn't know what to do. I set about to shadow another employee, Edmund Leon, an old friend from the cult era who just recently passed away from an overdose. Let me pause for a moment to reflect on the significance of encountering a departed soul in a somewhat hellish boiler room environment in dreamland. Ok. Enough of that. I just gave myself the chills. I don't want to think about the very real possibility that we may go on to even more tedious mundane existences after mucking it up in this one.  

Edmund didn't want me shadowing him, for fear that I'd actually pick up some of his trade secrets. There wasn't much chance of that, since he used the pretty much straightforward blindfolded, one-finger method for picking stocks. Likewise, there was nothing special about his random phone number dialing technique. He kept no notes or logs of the many failed numbers he dialed. He simply put his finger in the dial and spun it until it started ringing. He could have been dialing the same number over and over, or calling some deli in China for all I knew. 

His success rate would indicate that he was doing something right, though, so I continued to follow him around. He went out to his car to eat his lunch, driving a full block before parking in a designated lunch parking lot.

"If you're going to follow me on my lunch break, you've gotta at least buy me something," he said between mouthfuls of baloney sandwich.

"I'll do that next time," I promised. I never seemed to think out my strategies in advance.

Lunch ended soon enough, and it was back to the desk, the newspaper and the telephone. I started circling some interesting looking stocks. They were interesting because of the acronyms they formed and because of the way they stood out on the page, not because I knew anything about the companies they represented. About that, I was as clueless as a newborn baby. I think that was why they chose newbies for this job: we had completely fresh, untrained eyes that weren't tainted by such things as knowledge or perception.

The company would go on despite my success or lack of it. I would be there for a spell, but the old edifice would remain a presence on the busy city street, despite being five makeovers out of date architecturally. Presumably, Walter Klein would remain on as well, as the perpetually old, yet never aging, curmudgeonly operations manager, reciting the Glengarry Creed to infinite future generations of frightened new employees.