August 6, 2017
“Tom can sometimes come across as arrogant about his abilities,” a teacher wrote in 1992. “He should appreciate the value of diplomacy!” his English teacher said on another occasion. Hayes acknowledged the problem: “I need to improve my attitude in that I respect ideas I disagree with,” he wrote in a self-assessment.”
August 6, 2017
“And Hayes became obsessed with collecting things. He stock-piled used train tickets. He built a vast army of toy metal soldiers. He amassed dozens and dozens of football stickers, which he arranged in particular orders. His purest love, though, was mathematics. He cherished the simplicity, the objectivity of numbers. They never lied, they never disappointed you, unlike so many people in his life. You couldn’t misinterpret numbers—a valuable quality for a literal-minded boy like Hayes. Equations were beautiful, not to mention reliable: Marriages could fail, friends could fight, girls could ignore you, and QPR could (and often did) lose, but the square root of nine was always three, the angles of a triangle always added up to 180 degrees”
August 6, 2017
“ Hayes was watching people robotically feed coins into the machines and calculating which machine was due to deliver the next jackpot. Then he would put his money in. The tactic worked”
August 6, 2017
“After Hayes’s first year in college, Brown told Sandy that her son could have a summer job working in the Treasury. She turned down the offer on Hayes’s behalf, without asking him. Sandy felt her son was too conservative to fit into Blair and Brown’s centre-left government. She described Hayes to acquaintances as a Thatcherite, a reference to the 1980s Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Coming from Sandy, the label was derogatory.”
August 6, 2017
“Pulling off profitable transactions on behalf of clients wasn’t the only way that traders made money. They also were expected to place their own separate bets on the direction of markets and to amass positions so that they profited if their bets turned out to be correct. This was fundamentally different from market making, but market makers were among those plying this type of trade in addition to their main jobs.”
August 13, 2017
“Hayes cannily accepted the UBS operations gig, but when he returned to Nottingham in the autumn, he started applying for trading jobs at other banks: the Royal Bank of Scotland, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank. He landed interviews everywhere other than at Goldman. When the Scottish bank offered him an entry-level position as part of the bank’s training program, he accepted and informed UBS that he no longer wanted the back-office assignment.”
August 13, 2017
“Hayes started at the Royal Bank of Scotland that autumn. RBS’s office was on the bustling eastern edge of the City, just across a busy street from the Bishopsgate Police Station. Hayes’s starting salary was about £35,000, along with an expected £15,000 bonus—a substantial take for someone just out of university.”
August 13, 2017
“Hayes spent most of his time doing menial tasks. There was a lot of data entry. He learned to use Microsoft Excel, whose spreadsheets served as the backbone for many of RBS’s trading models. He also scurried around doing personal favours for established traders—he got their keys cut, fetched their coffee, delivered their clothes to the dry cleaner, purchased gifts for their parents and girlfriends. Hayes, like plenty of grunts on trading desks, endured merciless mockery. One subject of harassment was his clothes—he still dressed too well. He wore a jacket and tie to work while most colleagues opted for a business-casual look of slacks and a light-coloured button-down shirt. One trader threatened to cut off his necktie if he wore it again.”
August 13, 2017
“hen it came to obeying the rules, the only check was the bank’s legal and compliance department, which was supposed to make sure employees knew the rules—statutory, not moral—that they had to follow. ”
August 13, 2017
“During compliance training sessions at RBS, traders hunched over their BlackBerrys playing the addictive “Brick Breaker” game. The goal was to knock out each layer of tiles, brick by brick, the high score the only measure that mattered.”
Notes From: David Enrich. “The Spider Network.” iBooks.
Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itunes.apple.com/dk/book/the-spider-network/id1145710390?mt=11
