The Buy Side (7 page)

I’m not sure why Keryn thought of me when the job opened at
Galleon. The last time I was with her was her last day at Morgan. She was saying goodbye to everyone when I walked over to her, smiled, and offered my congratulations. Then I thought I’d be a wise guy and offer to make out with her as a going-away present. She said sure. And right there, in front of forty Wall Street professionals, I felt my manhood shrink. I couldn’t do it. Maybe that’s why she liked me, why she called me about the job before anyone else. Wall Street is full of ego and bluster. In me she saw something a bit more authentic, like the guy who was too afraid to ask the pretty girl to the senior prom.

A few days after my Galleon interview, the phone rings in my apartment, a four-bedroom in a typical high-rise building on West Sixty-Seventh Street. I’ve lived here for a couple of years now. The phone rings again. It’s Monday afternoon and nobody’s home to answer it. The phone sits on a chair that looks like a giant hand with the palm for the seat and the fingers for the back. It keeps ringing. The chair is surrounded by contemporary furniture: a couch, chairs, tables, and lamps. There’s a Foosball table and a homemade bar. The place is strewn with remnants left from the weekend—a few empty beer bottles and a pizza box. My roommates and I live in an Alpha Pottery Barn frat house. The ringing stops and the call goes into voice mail. “Nobody can come to the phone, but we’d like to know you called … For Turney, press one; for Jason, press two; if you want Jayme, press three; for Ethan, press four; and if you need Johnny, well … sorry, there are no voice mails left.”

When I get home I check my messages. “Hey, Turney, this is Janine from the Galleon Group,” the cheery voice says. “We’d like to offer you the trading position. Please call me back so we can set up a time for you to come in and sign the contract.” Later, Janine would tell me she almost reconsidered the offer when she heard how many roommates I had. How could she take me seriously? “Welcome to the buy side,” her voice mail says.

SO WHAT’S
the buy side? I don’t really know the difference between the sell side and the buy side, but I soon learn. Imagine the relationship in biblical terms. Old Testament. If you’re on the buy side, you roll into the marketplace with a wagon filled with the pharaoh’s gold, charged with buying the best products you can. The pharaoh will compensate you for good purchases. Now, though you have a proprietary relationship with the pharaoh’s money, it’s not your money, and the only thing you stand to lose is what you might gain. And you stand to gain a lot if your performance is good. Like, the next time you roll into the marketplace your wagon might have custom rims or built-in GPS. But you’re not the only wagon of gold. So when you get there you have to be ready. The open market is buzzing. There are merchants everywhere. If you’re on the sell side, you want the pharaoh’s buyer as your customer. Every merchant wants to get the highest price he can for all of his goods, and they all want to rid themselves of the crap
in their inventory. They want the highest revenues. Competition between the merchants for your attention is great. They need you. Some of them offer you boat rides down the Nile with a few “mistresses of the house,” or a tomb in the pyramids, or a weekend in Mesopotamia with some really good lotus. Whatever. But a lot of them are phonies, and if you end up buying the crap, or paying too much, maybe the pharaoh doesn’t let you drive the wagon next time. Or worse, you have to go back to being a merchant. If I buy some livestock from the guy who took me down the Nile on Thursday night and I can sell it at a profit to the guy I went to Mesopotamia with on Friday, then I’m going to do it. So in one sense, you need the sell side almost as much as they need you. On Wall Street the buy side can buy or sell—they’re the customer. The sell side is selling information, research, and customer facilitation.

In the simplest terms, the buy side is the client. The sell side loves clients.

RAJ RAJARATNAM
, Gary Rosenbach, Krishen Sud, and a fourth guy named Ari Arjavalingam (who worked on the West Coast) started Galleon in 1997. They all came from Needham & Company, a small investment bank, where Raj’s performance, especially in tech stocks, was making the firm a lot of money. He was also making a lot more money for himself—ten times the profits he made for Needham. When the partner, George Needham, found out, he told Raj, Gary, and the others that they could no longer trade in their personal accounts. It was then that the four of them bolted from Needham to launch the Galleon Group. Their timing was sublime. It coincided with both the technology boom and the emergence of hedge funds. Still, in the early years, they had to scratch and claw for every resource they got, but now, in 1999, Galleon’s sails are aligned with the favorable financial wind.

On the day I sign my contract, I meet most of the management
team at Galleon, including Krishen, Gary, and Raj, who is on the phone when I’m introduced to him again. I met him briefly when I was interviewing. A delightful bull of a man, with dark skin, thick glasses, and a mustache, he smiles and shakes my hand firmly while cradling the phone between his shoulder and ear. He has a gap between his front teeth, which gives him a friendly appearance. It makes me want to smile. But I also know that the seat of the person I’m taking over for is still warm. From what I was told, she was attractive, smart, and aggressive. There was one problem. She was accumulating losing trades and not booking them into the portfolio. In Galleon’s code, this is tantamount to stealing. When she could no longer keep it a secret and the bosses found out, she was fired on the spot. No one lies to or steals from Raj.

Krishen runs the healthcare portfolio. It took me a year to figure out, but in many ways, Krishen is Raj’s alter ego. While Raj is Sri Lankan, Krishen grew up in Mumbai, India. Thin, with pleasing features and cinnamon-colored skin, he has a gentle demeanor. Everyone seems to like Krishen, especially investors. Someone once said of his skills at raising capital that he’s the type of guy who can walk into a third-grade classroom and leave with all the lunch money. He shakes my hand and with a distinguished smile tells me they’re pleased to have me as part of their team. So far, so good. It seems everybody’s nice and happy to have me here.

Then I’m reintroduced to Gary on the trading desk. About forty, with a brown receding hairline, he’s got on a golf shirt and faded jeans that are a tad too tight. His most distinguishing characteristic is his nasally voice. He smiles and stands up to shake my hand. Welcome aboard, he says. Then he looks me up and down and smirks.

“A hundred and fifty k, huh?”

“I did,” I say.

Rosenbach interviewed me, and one of the questions he asked was how much I was making at Morgan Stanley. I told him $150,000. I was only making about $35,000 because I had left my group in PCS and was floating again.

He laughs and tells me I’m a liar but he admires my guts. Either he knows the truth or he’s bluffing. Regardless, Gary makes me uneasy. He then begins to give me my job description, words I’ll hear over and over for the first six months of my time at Galleon: Never let a phone ring more than once. Take a report. Book the trade into the system. Answer the phones. Take a report. Book the trade into the system. Answer the phones. Take a report. Book the trade into the system. Again, again, again. Recap all the trades at the end of the day. Make sure you confirm, buy or sell, the share amount, price, commission, and the correct account. In the morning make sure there are no trade breaks. No mistakes. When he finally finishes he looks directly into my eyes. “Each day expect to be fired,” he says. “If you’re not, then you’ve had a good day.”

The terror begins each morning in the shower. The frightening thoughts come one after the other like punches to my solar plexus. Did I book everything correctly yesterday? Did I remember to do everything Gary said last night? Each and every morning, I go to work with a knot in my stomach. It’s the same every day.

I’m the first one in the office. The only illumination is from the computer screens that were left on and now radiate screen-saver patterns. I flick on the lights. The new office is huge. It feels as big as a car dealership. The entire floor is outlined with small offices for the analysts. Half of the spaces are empty, but I guess we’re planning on expanding. (After my first summer we move to a lower floor with a lot more space. As our assets grow, so does everything else.) The trading desk is past all of the offices except Raj’s. It’s laid out like the letter T.
There’s one long desk against the back wall, where Gary and Keryn sit. Then there’s a wider desk that comes out from the middle of the other desk, with room for three traders on each side. I sit in the middle.

I take my seat and begin to check all of our trades from the previous day. I have to make sure there are no errors. I have a bad feeling, but it’s the same every day. It’s like I’m carrying around a twelve-pound bowling ball. My mom always told me it’s okay to make mistakes, but she never worked at a hedge fund. Even though I’m stressed, this time of the morning is still the calmest part of my day. There’s no chaos. And no bosses.

But I’m still nervous. Along with checking for trade errors, I have to order breakfast for the bosses and all the traders and have it on their desks by the time they arrive. Their thinking, I guess, is if I can’t perfect a breakfast order, how am I going to handle million-dollar buys and sell orders? Getting someone’s breakfast order wrong sometimes incurs more wrath than losing money. What they don’t realize is, I might say “crispy bacon” when I place the order, but I don’t actually cook the bacon. I’ve become tight with the Hispanic girl at the deli. I stop by now and then just to say hello.
“Cómo estás, mi nombre es Turney, me gusta esquiar.”
She laughs at my enunciation. But I don’t think she understands the gravity of my situation. The bacon isn’t always right.

Twenty minutes later, everyone starts to arrive. Through the door they walk, the same order every day, with the traders leading the way. Keryn’s first. Every day it’s the same: she carries a cup of coffee, an unread newspaper, and some personal issue from the night before, like a pipe bursting in her apartment or an alien that tried to abduct her. I couldn’t make up half of the things that happen to her, and, except perhaps for the alien, all of her stories ring true. Her life is crazy. Todd-o is next. Why they call him that I have no idea—his last name is Harrison. Handsome, with dark hair and eyes, he looks every inch
the hotshot options trader he purports to be. Galleon poached him from Morgan Stanley. He sits to my left and the first words out of his mouth always are “Oh man!” I know what comes next. Each one of his stories begins in this manner. They always involve a limo, a chick who stuck her claws into him, and animal sex back at his apartment. I hope he gets laid half as much as he says he does. But I’m not sure why he tries to impress me.

Then comes Dave Slaine, my protector. He’s arrived straight from the gym. If I didn’t know any better, I’d guess he had shoulder pads underneath his golf shirt. He already knows everything happening in the market before he sits down. I feel safe with Dave sitting to my right. I know I could be fired at any minute, but in Dave I feel like I have at least one advocate. When Gary asks me a question I don’t know, Dave usually whispers the answer to me.

And then there’s Ruby, who’s a Bruce Willis look-alike—the shaved-head version. His real name is Craig. He wears tight designer jeans and open-collar shirts. If Abercrombie and Fitch had a department for forty-year-olds, Ruby would be their best customer. The thing about Ruby is, I don’t really know why he’s here or what he does exactly. He sits on our trading desk, but he isn’t an employee of the firm that I know of. He’s a cross between a runaway teen we picked up at the bus stop and a kid from the Fresh Air Fund. He used to be a bouncer at some club like Odeon or Heartbreak, or one of the other eighties nightclubs out of
Bright Lights, Big City
. Some days it seems like he still thinks he’s a bouncer or maybe a bodyguard, the way he assesses people who walk through the office door. He’s still in bouncer shape. He’s a gym rat just like Dave and Gary. But for all the time I work at Galleon, I never really figure Ruby out.