Why would you want to become an investment banker? A few years ago, you didn’t necessarily need a qualitative reason. The money was enough. Now, as salaries have downshifted from tremendous to very good, other factors need to be considered.

We talked to former investment banker Chris Thomas, who spent 18 months as a post-MBA associate at a major bank in the U.S. before leaving the industry, to get his take on what one needs to know before making the plunge. He was honest and critical but, unlike some other former investment bankers, he didn’t condemn the industry or his former employer, which he asked to remain nameless. There are just a few fallacies associated with the business that you need to know. Here are his main takeaways. (note: Chris Thomas is a pseudonym used to protect the identity of the source).

Exit opportunities are fleeting: A fair percentage of investment bankers use the job as a launching point for a different career path. But transitioning to buy-side isn’t nearly as easy as one might think, or at least it isn’t as easy as it once was, Thomas said.

“Go look at job postings on the buy-side. Most are looking for a pre-MBA or they want you to already have buy-side experience,” he said. “You end up in no man’s land. Most guys think there are great exits but it’s not true anymore.”

Once you have more than two years of experience and your price tag becomes more expensive, you tend to get pigeonholed and stuck in the industry, he added.

MD isn’t a finishing line: Another fallacy that he noticed surrounds the life of senior bankers, particularly those of managing directors, which are often glorified. Sure you make more money, but the carrot at the end of the tunnel isn’t what it used to be, Thomas said. “They say when you become more senior your lifestyle gets better,” he said. “I challenge that. They are still making weekend calls, just like everyone else.”

For the rest of this piece head to eFinancialCareers>

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Joanne Wilson is an angel investor, and her investment thesis is simple — she invests in people and real businesses, not ideas.

Within that, though, there's a wide range of possibilities. She addressed those in a recent interview with finance career site, OneWire for its video series Open Door.

As for the people part of her investing, Wilson, —who has invested in or advised 35 startups including Catchafire, Dailyworth, and Gotham Gym — tends to gravitate toward female entrepreneurs. 

"I think women in particular build businesses that fulfill voids in their lives," she told OneWire CEO Skiddy von Stade. "And I also think women are more team oriented than men, and they are also more realistic in regards to what their business can do, sometimes to the point that they don't see how big they can be. Whereas men... have a very sort of bravado look at their businesses."

This has been a hot topic on Wall Street lately. On the top, two powerful women —JP Morgan's Blythe Masters and Brevan Howard's Geraldine Sundstrom — could leave the Street in the coming weeks. 

And in Wall Street's startup world (that is, after all, what a lot of new hedge funds are), hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson wrote a great piece for Dealbook parsing together why there aren't more female hedge fund managers in finance. 

He posed the question to a woman working as a hedge fund analyst, and she was kind enough to allow him to share her thoughts. She gave him a wide range of reasons, from the fact that women were disproportionately laid off during the crisis, to the fact that female analysts aren't paid enough early in their careers to put down the $1 to $2 million of their own cash backers like BlackRock want to see before they shell out.

Sounds like Wall Street needs more Joanne Wilson's, really.

Watch the full interview here:

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In honor of Valentine's Day, we've decided to feature some of the hottest power couples on Wall Street. 

The range here is wide. We have fund managers who date well-known actresses. We have bankers who are married to attorneys and television anchors. We even have someone who is married to a princess.

We wish them all a Happy Valentine's Day.  

Now let's meet them. 

Princess Madeleine and hedge funder Chris O'Neill

Status: Married

Him: O'Neill, 39, is a partner and head of research at Noster Capital, a value investing hedge fund. He doesn't have a royal title. 

Her: She's a Swedish princess. 

Fun Fact: They're expecting the birth of their first child very soon. They plan to have the baby in New York.

Socialite Pippa Middleton and stockbroker Nico Jackson

Status: Dating 

Her: She's the younger sister of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge. 

Him: He's a tall, blue-eyed stockbroker for Deutsche Bank based in London.  

Chelsea Clinton and hedge funder Marc Mezvinsky

Status: Married

Her: Daughter of President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. She has previously worked for Mckinsey & Co. and Avenue Capital. 

Him: He's a partner at Eaglevale Partners LP. He has previously worked at Goldman Sachs and New York-based hedge fund G3 Capital. 

Fun Fact: Mezvinskys' parents were both members of Congress. 

Neel Kashkari, who oversaw the government's bank bailout in 2008, spoke to us about running for governor of California. 

Kashkari is running as a Republican and his platform is focusing on just two key issues— jobs and education. 

He considers himself to be a moderate Republican. His focus isn't on social issues.  

"What the Republican party is being cast as is not why I'm a Republican," he said in a telephone interview with Business Insider."It's not the Republican party I believe in. I'm a Republican because I believe economic growth is the most powerful force to lift people up. I believe that the Republicans should be the party that's fighting for the middle class and fighting for the poor. Our solutions are not more welfare. Our solutions are a good education and a good job."

We spoke to Kashkari about TARP and his time at Goldman Sachs among other topics.  

Kashkari was appointed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program that bailed out the banks during the height of the financial crisis. He told us his experience working with both sides of the aisle on TARP will help him in his gubernatorial run.

After the Treasury, Kashkari worked at  PIMCO as the head of global equities.  He also worked at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco from 2002 until 2008. 

Below is a transcript from our Q&A (Note: This has been lightly edited for clarity):

BI: How do you think your experience with the Treasury helps you while running for governor in California? 

NK: The TARP is the best example in modern American history of Republicans and Democrats coming together to tackle a terrible, terrible crisis. And I think that experience of getting Republicans and Democrats to work together will help me get Republicans and Democrats to work together in Sacramento. We have a crisis in California—We have 24 percent of the state living in poverty. We have 17 percent of the state in need of work. And we have schools that are ranked 46th. And right now, the status quo is devastating for millions of California families. And what I want to do is bring that same—you know, the experience of the financial crisis with it, you don't break the back of a crisis with small policies. You're required to use overwhelming force. I want to bring that same overwhelming force and break the back of the crisis that's been hammering California families.  

BI: I'm looking at the years you were at the Treasury... Some people might say 'That's not many years in public service.' How would you answer people if they ask you about not having much experience as a political leader? 

NK: Well, three years battling the worst economic crisis that our country has faced since the Great Depression, I think, is great training to tackle the crisis that's hammering California families.

By the way, there are a lot of other folks who ran for governor as their first elected office whether it's Ronald Reagan or Mitch Daniels or President George W. Bush or Mitt Romney. There are a lot of examples of very successful governors for whom that was their first elected office. 

BI: How about folks out there who might criticize your experience with the Treasury and say that it was just about bailing out the banks? 

NK: We hated having to intervene and use tax payer resources. We wanted to let all the banks fail because they deserved to fail. No one owed them anything. But when we realized we were facing a Great Depression scenario where literally your ATM might not work , literally might not be able to cash your paycheck, that's when we realized we had to intervene.  But, if we were going to intervene, we were going to do it in a way that protected the taxpayers. And that's why I'm really proud of the fact that the program that  I ran while we deployed $422 billion dollars we got every dollar back and we even made a $13 billion profit for the taxpayers. There's no program in American history that's ever done that. 

BI: Can you discuss what sort of strengths you gained during your experience whether it was at Goldman Sachs, the Treasury or PIMCO? What sorts of values have you gained in your experiences?

NK: One of the things that was critical in Washington was that we worked arm-and-arm with the legislative branch, so executive branch and legislative branch working together. We focused on the biggest crisis facing our country and we said, 'We will work with anybody of any party who is committed to tackling this crisis' and we did. So, I worked with Judd Gregg on Republican side and I worked with Barney Frank on the Democratic side. We put politics aside and said, 'Let's do what's the best thing for our country'. And we got Republicans and Democrats to work together and to put politics aside. So that's a critical skill that I think is directly relevant to Sacramento. 

BI: Are you still keeping in touch with some of your former colleagues as you run? Have you talked to Hank Paulson or Bill Gross? And have they given you advice? If they have what sort of advice have they given you? 

NK: Hank [Paulson] is a big supporter of mine...He's been a donor to my campaign, which I really appreciate. Hank is a spectacular leader. He's somebody who's so laser focused on tackling problems, will work with anybody, how to get things done and focused on results. I learned a tremendous amount from him. He continues to be a mentor and friend to me. And others around the country who have given me a lot of advice. Mitch Daniels has given me a lot of advice both on politics, but also on economic policy. Jeb Bush has given a lot of advice on education policy. You know, I don't have all the answers, so what I do is I tap into all the experts around the country to get their best ideas and figure out what we can bring to California.  

BI: Is there anything specific in terms of advice that has really resonated with you? 

NK: One of the things that's critical is getting out there and really letting people get to know you in a way that most candidates don't do. So when Mitch Daniels ran for governor of Indiana he traveled all around the state and he never stayed in a hotel. He would spend the night in some random Indiana family's home as a way to let them genuinely get to know him and him to get to know them. When Jeb Bush ran for governor of Florida he said education is going to be my signature issue. He set a goal of visiting a hundred schools in Florida. He ended up visiting 250 schools in Florida. But again, it demonstrated a real genuineness and authenticity. And so I'm using those as role models for me as I'm traveling all around the state going in some of the poorest communities in California...whether it's visiting and attending service at African-American churches in south central L.A., visiting food banks, homeless shelters, etc. getting out there and really letting people get to know me and me get to know what's happening on the ground in communities across California. That's been critical, but that's something that I learned from Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels that they did very effectively. 

BI: I noticed that your campaign is focusing on education and jobs and not so much social issues. Can you speak about that. 

NK: My platform is very simple — jobs and education. Because I feel like with 17 percent of Californians in need of work, millions of Californians are struggling, a lot of kids are graduating from college with thousands of dollars of student loan debt and no jobs and that's a huge problem. Then, with education we're ranked 46th in the country. I grew up in a middle class family. My family was not wealthy, but I did have one big advantage growing up and that is my parents were educated and they insisted that I got a good education. Because I got that education, every opportunity has been opened to me and that's just not true for millions of Californians today. I feel like if we do these two things, we unleash the private sector to create good jobs and we put people back to work and we fix the schools so kids are getting a good education. If we do those two things, most of the other problems in our state become a lot easier to solve. We'll have less crime, fewer kids getting on drugs, fewer kids entering gangs. Our budget will be much much stronger because we'll have fewer people who need support from welfare and many more taxpayers in the state. To me, we can't do everything at once, so let's focus on the most important issues facing the state and that's jobs and education. 

BI: What are you thoughts on Wall Street now today since we're past the financial crisis whether it's insider trading or the regulations? 

NK: The insider trading is outrageous. It's fraud. Insider trading has been going on for a long time and I don't think the Justice Department is being anywhere near aggressive enough in pursuing these cases... The U.S. District attorney has a record of...79 and 0. But he's not going after the hard cases...Why isn't Steven A. Cohen, why isn't he prosecuting him for criminal fraud or criminal insider trading? How is it possible that all of the underlings are guilty, but the guy whose name on the door he didn't know. This is like a bad mob where all the street thugs are guilty, but the mob boss didn't know what's going on. So the DOJ needs to be much more aggressive and willing to take some career risk at losing some cases if that's what it means. Because if they're not prosecuting these guys, yeah they preserve their perfect track record, but then the guy's getting off scot-free and that's ridiculous.  To me, I think the DOJ needs to be much more aggressive in pursuing the insider trading and fraud cases. Insider trading and fraud undermine everyone's confidence in the whole system. That does damage for all of us. 

BI: Anything with regulations? 

NK: I think that the Dodd-Frank bill is very well intentioned. I think it's going to be years before we know the full implications of that. I think the one thing that's very good is the banks have more capital today. That's the buffer against bad things happening. Banks should have more capital so I'm happy about that. Whether we've got the rest of the regulations right, I don't know yet. Unfortunately it's probably going to be years before we know it. We just have to remain vigilant. We can't let ourselves fall into a false sense of security. 

BI: What would you say to people who criticize you for having worked at Goldman in the past? 

NK: My job. I was based in California.  My job was to help start up companies in California raise money and pursue strategic transactions. So a start up would come to us and say, "Hey, we want to build a new plant. We want to expand and hire a lot of people." My job was to help them raise that money. What I did in California is very, very different than some of the misdeeds that were going on in New York. And, I'm proud of what I did in California because I helped California businesses compete globally. So I hope people will give me the chance to explain what I did and look at my record for themselves and draw their own conclusions. 

BI: Can you talk to me about the moment when you decided, 'I'm going to run for governor in California'? What was it that made you want to do this.

NK: The truth is I first started thinking about this after the 2012 presidential election after Governor Romney lost. I was a supporter of his. I thought he would have been an excellent president. In California, the Democrats took over a super majority in both the legislative bodies—the assembly and the senate. And so I just looked at this as someone has to be willing to fight and turn this around. What the Republican party is being cast as is not why I'm a Republican. It's not the Republican party I believe in. I'm a Republican because I believe economic growth is the most powerful force to lift people up. I believe that the Republicans should be the party that's fighting for the middle class and fighting for the poor. Our solutions are not more welfare. Our solutions are a good education and a good job. For me, this is also about rebuilding the Republican party around a very positive economic platform, a very inclusive message that's bringing all ethnicities into the Republican party and also socio-economic groups into the Republican party. And so, that's when I started thinking about it and then I spent a year meeting with families across the state that are struggling, meeting with Republican across the state to share my ideas and get their thoughts and also meeting with potential donors to see if we will be able to raise the resources to run a competitive campaign. And it was a culmination of those three areas of work that finally lead me to make the decision of 'Yes, this makes sense. I'm going to run for governor.'

BI: How do you think you're going to be able to compete with the current governor, Jerry Brown? 

NK: Well, Governor Brown is certainly going to have far more resources than we are. But, the facts are unfortunately on our side. Twenty-four percent of Californians live in poverty. Governor Brown has no answer. Seventeen percent of Californians need work. Yet, Governor Brown has no answer. Our schools are ranked 46th. Governor Brown has no answer. And the people of California feel the pain because they are the families who are struggling. They're the ones worrying about keeping a roof over their head, keeping food on the table. I've been visiting food banks that are doing robust business because families don't have jobs. I want to put every food bank in California out of business because we put people back to work and they don't need to turn to those food banks for their dinner. So if you look at Governor Brown's re-elect numbers, he's pretty popular. Fifty percent of Californians like him and approve of him so to speak, but only about 1/3 of California voters think he should be re-elected and that's because families are struggling. They know they're struggling. They know the state is not back. And every time he pats himself on the back for solving all the problems it rings hollow. It's as though he's tone deaf of what people on the street are really feeling and I want to be a voice for all of them. 

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You may have seen Mark Axelowitz—a managing director at UBS Private Wealth Management—on television before. 

We don't mean on CNBC or Bloomberg TV either, even though he's appeared on both financial networks.

The 53-year-old Wall Street financial advisor has played roles on hit television shows "Law & Order,""Blue Bloods," and "Boardwalk Empire." He was also in "The Three Stooges" movie (2012).

It's a hobby that he accidentally fell into while in his 40s.

In 2004, at an event benefiting the Boys & Girls Harbor, an education and performing arts non-profit supported by many in the finance industry, "Law & Order" executive producer Dick Wolf donated a speaking role on the popular television show as an auction item. 

That evening, Axelowitz engaged in a bidding war against actor Chevy Chase for the coveted auction item. In the end, the Wall Street financial advisor won the role for $10,000. 

For the part, Axelowitz got to play a jury foreman in an episode called "Fixed" (Season 15, episode 11).  He went to Chelsea Piers in Lower Manhattan for a weekend of filming.

It was his first time being exposed to the world of television and he was pumped. He got to get his makeup done for the first time, and excitedly told the other actors how he had 19 words to recite.  

People on set thought that was funny because "real" actors don't memorize how many words they have.

The financial advisor, who is used to giving presentations and speaking publicly because of his job, thought he would cruise through his part.

"Because I only had 19 words I did not rehearse my lines much at all before I got onto the set. Because I did public speaking over the years, I did not think I would get nervous," he told Business Insider.

He admitted that he was "dead wrong" on that one. When it was time for him to deliver his lines, he stuttered. 

"It was a whole different ball game. When you are on set and all the lights, and all the cameras and all of the celebrities are looking at  you, in my case, I got nervous, which is why we had to do a number of takes because I stumbled on one particular word." 

Even to this day, he still remembers those 19 words. It was the word "degree" that he couldn't spit out.

Judge: "Have you reached a verdict?"

Jury Foreman (Axelowitz): "Yes, we have your honor."

Judge: "How say you?"

Jury Foreman (Axelowitz): "On the charge of murder in the second degree, we the jury find the defendant not guilty."

When Axelowitz is on the set of a show, he doesn't advertise that he's a Wall Streeter. Most folks on set assume that he's a working actor.  

"I'm not doing it for the money," he explained.  "I do not golf. I do not play tennis. My philanthropic work and my acting are my passions and my hobbies."

When he's compensated for acting, he donates it back to charity. For example, for "Law & Order" he would receive checks for $2,000 making a total of $10,000.  All of that money went back to the Boys & Girls Harbor.

Other charities have benefited from Axelowitz's hobby as well.  He's on the board of the Boys & Girls Harbor and co-hosts an annual investment conference alongside hedge fund manager Bill Ackman.  He's also been active with popular Wall Street charity the Robin Hood Foundation since 1992. He does giving outside of those as well.

While on set, he found a common interest with people through his involvement in philanthropy.

"What was interesting on the set of Law & Order as a rookie that I was, you don't talk to the stars. Somehow, Sam Waterson and I ended up speaking and I ended up helping him do work on set in his dressing room putting together mailings for this Lutheran Church fundraiser helping him seal envelopes." 

Also, on the set, he met a director, Alison Thompson, who had a strong interest in volunteer work. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks Thompson spent months volunteering at Ground Zero. Axelowitz and his family helped support her volunteer efforts in Sri Lanka following the tsunami and in Haiti following the earthquake.  

Since Law & Order, he's been on "Blue Bloods" (crime scene detective) and HBO's "Boardwalk Empire" (court reporter). He also played the doctor in "The Three Stooges" movie. 

He's now member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) thanks to the help of Alison Thompson.

He's also been working with acting coaches Gary Swanson, who was a student of legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg, and Lola Cohen, who teaches at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.   

Right now, Axelowitz is in the process of producing a short film with a few of his Hollywood contacts. It's a ten-minute film that has a socially conscious message about the ill-effects of soda on children, he explained. The name of the short is "Can't Beat The Real Thing"— meaning you can't beat natural drinks. 

Axelowitz certainly wants to be remembered for his acting in addition to his other roles in life.   

"I define myself first as a father of three, a husband of twenty-five years. And then a philanthropist. You don't have to be a billionaire to be a philanthropist ... as long as you give away some of your resources... most importantly your time and your talent.  Third, what I do for my day job as a financial advisor of 27 years. And fourth, as an actor." 

"I believe life is very short. It's not a dress rehearsal. I want to try as many things as possible." 

Now check out some photos of Axelowitz below: 

Here's Axelowitz getting his makeup done for "The Three Stooges."

In his "Three Stooges" cast chair : 

On set of "Blue Bloods" with crime scene detective Jennifer Esposito:

Axelowitz with "30 Rock" star Alec Baldwin, Todd Kauffmann (UBS), and Anthony Coscio. 

Axelowitz with Alison Thompson, producer of "The Third Wave," and Tony Duke, the founder of the Boys & Girls' Harbor. 

On set of "The Three Stooges" with Will Sasso (Curly):

Axelowitz with one of his favorite actors, Paul Newman.

Axelowitz with legendary fund manager Paul Tudor Jones at the Robin Hood benefit last year.  The green necklace represents over 20 years of service to Robin Hood. 

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Humans are horrible at understanding compound interest, and it's making our golden years much less so.

Think about your 401(k). The first thing you probably look at when you pick your funds is their returns. It's only human nature. Everybody likes to think about their nest eggs growing and growing and growing—especially if they're growing a little bit faster than everybody else's. But, in this case, human nature is costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The sad fact is that returns aren't certain, but fees are. Now, maybe everything will go according to plan, and your 401(k) will be partying like it's 1999. Maybe the 1 percent—or more—that you're paying in fees will actually buy you market-beating returns. But probably not. You can see this in the chart to the left from Vanguard. It shows the percentage of actively managed funds that have underperformed index funds over the short and longer hauls, net of fees. Which is to say, most of them. It's hard enough for funds to beat their benchmarks over just one to three-year periods. But that gets damn near impossible the longer you go. Once you account for survivorship bias—that bad funds go bust, and disappear from the sample—almost 80 percent of actively managed funds don't beat simple index funds over 10 to 15-year periods.

In the meantime, you're stuck paying fees. Those fees don't sound too bad — just 1 percent! — but this is where our total lack of intuition for how compounding works really hurts us. Let's try an example: what's 0.99 to the 40th power? It's not exactly a calculation you can do in your head. It's not even one you can estimate. But it's the kind of calculation that you need to do to figure out how much your 401(k) fees are costing you.

The answer is a lot more than you think. (No cheating with a calculator before we get to the big reveal). Now, let's say you contribute $3,000 to your 401(k) every year, which is a little more than the national average, starting when you're 25. Let's also say that you're choosing between two investments: the lowest-cost index fund with a 0.08 percent fee, and a typical managed stock fund with, according to Morningstar, a 1.33 percent fee. And finally, let's say that, though you don't know it, they both return 7 percent a year, because, as we saw above, most managed funds don't beat the market.

This 1.25 percent difference in annual fees adds up to a six-figure difference in lifetime earnings. That's because you don't just lose the money you pay in fees. You lose the returns you could have had on the money you pay in fees, too. As you can see in the chart below, this compounding effect doesn't matter much for the first 20 years or so, but really accelerates after that. If you chose the lowest-cost index fund, you'd have $15,000 more at age 45, $55,000 more at 55, and $159,000 more at 65. That would balloon to $257,000 more if you waited to retire at 70.

This is some brutal math. It's 27 percent of your retirement going to Wall Street for nothing. Actually, less than nothing. Remember, about 80 percent of actively managed funds do worse than index funds after you take fees into account. It's a Wall Street handout that you can't afford to make.

Skip the fees, and save your retirement.

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A man jumped off of JP Morgan's Hong Kong headquarters to his death, according to George Chen of the South China Morning Post.

JP Morgan has confirmed that the man who jumped was a 33 year-old employee at the firm with the last name Li. He was a junior banker in operations.

This comes at a delicate time for the financial industry, when a spate of deaths— mostly in London — have alarmed observers.

Last month, a 39-year-old JP Morgan vice president died after falling from the roof of the bank's European headquarters in London.

And right before that, a former Deutsche Bank senior executive was found dead in his London home after an apparent suicide.

Witnesses say that police tried to stop Li from jumping from the 30 story building, 10 floors of which are used by JP Morgan, around 2:00 or 3:00 pm, but to no avail.  

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In January 2012, then-Dealbook reporter Kevin Roose rented an ill-fitting tuxedo and crashed the secretive black-tie induction ceremony for exclusive Wall Street fraternity Kappa Beta Phi.

Kappa Beta Phi has been around since before the 1929 stock market crash. It's an invite-only frat that includes some of the biggest names on the Street.  

That frat also has some odd traditions. Their leaders have titles such as a "Grand Swipe,""Grand Smudge,""Grand Loaf," and a "Master at Arms." Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross was the Grand Swipe when Roose observed the fraternity up close.

That night at the St. Regis Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, Roose witnessed some of Wall Street's biggest names wearing drag and performing skits making fun of Occupy Wall Street.

Roose, who now writes for New York Magazine, left out some juicy details in his original article, though. 

In his newly released book "Young Money" Roose explains how he eventually got caught for being a reporter.

While filming one of the performances on his cell phone, Fortress Investment Group exec Michael Novogratz—a former Army helicopter pilot and college wrestler—demanded to know who he was. 

Things got intense. 

From Roose's "Young Money" [via Daily Intelligencer]:  

Read the full story and check out photos and audio clips at Daily Intelligencer »

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Think of it like 'Real World, Wall Street': One journalist followed around eight young strangers in their first years of banking. Then the journalist, New York Magazine's Kevin Roose, put it all together in a book.

The book is called "Young Money, Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post Crash Recruits," and it's out today.

Roose spent years interviewing his subjects, crashing parties and recruiting events, even taking an Excel modeling classes. The work shows. His book is an honest portrait of young kids who, like everyone else, are engaged in the arduous business of growing up. They just happen to have a weird environment in which to do it.

It's clear from Roose's writing that you don't watch this sort of evolution without evolving yourself. That's why Business Insider caught up with him to get some answers about what he found — what is it that desensitizes kids when they get to The Street, how he found eight (eight!) young bankers who weren't too scared to talk to him, and more.

Here's what he learned:

Business Insider: What did you think about Wall Street before you started this project and how has that changed?

Kevin Roose: To be honest, I don't think my opinions of "Wall Street," as an entity, have changed that much. I still think banks are too big; I still think greed and insufficient regulation are a problem; I still think the financial crisis was a terrible, preventable thing.

What changed is how I think about bankers. I don't judge the young ones as a group anymore. There are good ones, and bad ones, and you kind of have to evaluate them on their individual merits, rather than writing them all off at once.

BI: How could you tell when you found someone who would make a good subject?

KR: I wanted to get a good cross-section of young Wall Street, so I had to make sure that in the group I chose, women would be represented, people of color would be represented, and they'd be spread out across Wall Street in terms of their firms and their job functions. Of course, the most important consideration was whether they were willing to be honest and real with me. If they just wanted to brag about how many beers they crushed last night or how many models they'd slept with, I wasn't that interested.

BI: Now that you've done this, why do you actually think people go to Wall Street?

KR: I think some people, especially people who come out of college with student debt, or whose parents are working-class, do it for the money. But other people do it because it's easy. If you go to Yale or Princeton, all your friends are going into banking, it pays well and gives you a prestigious launching pad and all you have to do is drop your résumé into a box to apply — a lot of kids say, why not?

BI: What do all these kids have in common after their experience on the Street?

KR: Gray hair.

BI: In a sentence, what does Wall Street do to your brain?

KR: Can I do it in a GIF?

BI:  Do you think these kids got paid too much?

KR: I mean, it's a lot of money. Most of them were making somewhere between $90,000 and $130,000 their first year, and more after that. I heard some of them say that if you calculate it hourly, based on how much they work, it's like $16 an hour. That's a good job! But it isn't as amazing as most people think.

BI: Have any of the kids you followed who left Wall Street shed the habits that they picked up there, or are they forever changed?

KR: I think a lot of the day-to-day habits are sheddable, especially if you get out within two years. But even the bankers who left finance told me that working on Wall Street had changed the way they thought about the world. It's a very strong belief system. I don't know if you can ever really leave it behind.

BI: Did you ever for any moment during your research wish you had become a banker? Even a little bit? Why? Why not?

KR: Nope! I'd be a terrible banker. I took an Excel boot camp, to learn how to make Excel models and stuff, and I think I came in last in the class on every exercise. And seeing how miserable my sources were at their jobs wasn't exactly a glowing testimonial. Also, I'm pretty sure I'm blackballed now, even if I did have a change of heart.

BI: The bottom line is that a lot of the kids you wrote about weren't happy. How should schools or recruiting programs change so that kids who won't be happy on Wall Street don't end up there?

KR: I think it's happening naturally as the industry's prestige wears off. It used to be that the kid at Yale who majored in archaeology would go into banking, just because that was the popular and cool thing to do. Now, that kid has more options, like going to Teach For America or Google. More of the students who are interested in Wall Street now are the ones who actually want to be bankers. There are fewer unhappy dilettantes who just do it because it's the next step on the path.

BI: Did you ever get mad or frustrated at your subjects? And if so, why?

KR: Once, I remember prodding a guy who was feeling sorry for himself. This guy was making something like $200,000 a year as a 24-year-old in private equity and he still wasn't happy, and he was pouring out his woes to me, and I kind of stopped him short. Like, do you know how lucky you are compared to the rest of the world? Most of the time, though, the bankers I followed had a good perspective on the relative size of their problems.

BI: What was the most obnoxious thing you saw in your research?

KR: I went to a Fashion Meets Finance dating mixer, which is where they put a bunch of Wall Street dudes in a room with a bunch of women who work in fashion. That was an atrocious party, just horrible. I actually heard a guy use the phrase "PJ," as in "private jet."

BI: What is it about Wall Street that desensitizes people?

KR: I think it's the pace. When you're 22 and working at a bank, you don't have much time to be sensitive and introspective. It's all about getting things done, avoiding mistakes, and impressing the boss.

BI: Did any banks seem to have a better culture than others or were they all the same?

KR: You know, I actually didn't see much of a difference between banks. I certainly think there are tendencies within the divisions of a firm — the stereotypical oil trader is a little more jock-like and macho than the investment banker at the same firm. But all the bankers I followed tended to have a fairly common set of experiences, no matter where they worked.

BI: Do you know any adults who made it through Wall Street well adjusted? How do you think they did it?

KR: I think it has to do with avoiding social isolation. If everyone you interact with all day is a millionaire or billionaire and works in finance, it warps your perspective. The people I know who work in finance and are the best-adjusted are the people who have diverse groups of friends — you know, they play pick-up basketball with cops, or they volunteer at a school one day a week. Their lives are bigger than just banking.

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“It was great meeting you – we’ll get back to you in a few days!”The VP shakes your hand, and you turn around and leave the room.

You walk out of the interview on top of the world.

After studying technical questions for 143 hours and reciting your story so many times that you could walk through your resume in your sleep, you’re confident you knocked this one out of the park.

You get back home and watch some TV to unwind…

And then a day passes.

You hear nothing.

Another day passes.

Still nothing.

And then it’s a week…

And before you know it, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, or even an entire month.

And you never hear back from that bank.

So what happened? Where did you go wrong?

Does it mean you got rejected and they’re not telling you? Or are they just disorganized?

And most importantly, what can you do to get a response?

Why You Get the Silent Treatment

Because you’re not the #1 candidate for the position.

The bank has already given an offer to someone else, or it has already given out the “targeted” number of offers, and it’s waiting for people to respond.

If candidates turn down their offers, the bank will approach candidates ranked lower on the list and start making offers to them.

So it’s not that you “failed” the interview – it’s just that other people were more impressive or fit in with the group better.

In some cases, this actually happens because the bank or group is so disorganized that they “forget” to notify you, which is why it’s critical to call back 2-3 days later AT MOST (and ideally before that).

It could even be something stupid, such as the bank losing your contact information or recording the incorrect email address or phone number.

But 90% of the time, it’s because you performed “on par” with other candidates – not poorly enough to receive an outright rejection, but not well enough to win an immediate offer.

So What Happens in Real Life?

Recruiting is at the bottom of the priority list for bankers – they are busy doing deals, winning clients, and otherwise making money.

Sometimes, it’s even at the bottom of the priority list for HR because they’re busy with… afternoon tea time each day? I have no idea, but it sure seems like that sometimes.

Let’s say you go in for Superday interviews with 10 other candidates, at a smaller, regional bank that’s looking to hire 2 interns for the summer.

Here’s what might happen behind the scenes:

The VP, MD, Associate, and 2 Analysts all like the same person the most and they decide to give him an immediate offer the day after the interview.Meanwhile, they’re divided on other candidates: the VP and MD like 2 other candidates the most and can’t decide between them, while the Associate and Analysts like 2 different candidates the most and rank them equally.And they all agree that the remaining 5 candidates were not nearly as good.

The reason why one person was the “top candidate” could be completely irrational – he and the interviewers were in the same frat, they had a shared interest in whitewater rafting, or the bankers simply liked the socks he wore.

Or it could be a more legitimate reason, such as having superior technical skills or having the exact deal and client experience the bank is looking for.

In any case, though, HR gathers everyone after the interviews and they start debating who else should receive an internship offer…

But 5 minutes into that discussion, the MD is pulled away because of a client emergency – a deal is falling apart at the last-minute due to a hostile offer made by an activist hedge fund.

Then, the Analysts get yanked away by their VP to finish a pitch book for an IPO bake-off the next day.

So that leaves the VP and Associate, who go back and forth but don’t reach a conclusion – but they’re leaning toward giving offers to 2 of the “4 remaining impressive candidates.”

So, what happens next?

In many cases, nothing at all!

The bank would rather give out 1 internship offer and then sit around and wait on everyone else.

In fact, they may not even deliver rejections to the 5 “not nearly as good” candidates.

Bankers get distracted by fire drills so much that it’s hard to gather everyone together again, so HR has to run between different people to get their views… if they bother to do that at all.

Each group works differently, but many offices would much rather hire 1 great intern than hire 1 great intern and 4 “OK” ones.

Remember why companies hire you in the first place: to make money, save money, or make a process more efficient.

They may not be paying you much money as an intern, but if they have to spend a lot of time answering questions and “training” you, that costs them time, which is equivalent to money.

It takes them away from deals and clients, which is the last thing any senior banker wants.

Why Not Just Deliver a Blunt Rejection?

The reasons vary, but some banks believe – incorrectly? – that it may be a legal liability to give you a “no” answer upfront.

Meanwhile, other people don’t like to deliver “bad news.”

But the main reason is that it costs the bank nothing to put you on hold and wait for other candidates to respond.

After all, if they give you an outright rejection, that’s it.

But if they don’t get back to you, or they respond to your emails but don’t give you a direct answer, the doors are always open.

And if the Top Candidate unexpectedly turns down his offer and can’t be persuaded otherwise, they’ll need to come back to you and everyone else on their list.

Realistically, What Can You Do About This?

The worst thing to do is to sit around, do nothing, and wait on a response from them.

Undergrads are particularly terrible about this – 90% of our email volume on this question has come from university students asking, “So I interviewed 3 weeks ago but haven’t heard back yet. Should I do anything?”

Yes, and you should have “done something” 2.5 weeks ago.

If you don’t hear back within 2 days, email at least 1-2 of your interviewees to follow-up, thank them again, and express your continued interest in the firm (those exact words can almost be your email template). Send a similar note to HR.

If they respond and they’re still communicating with you, you’re still in the running… whereas radio silence almost always means “no.”

Once you’ve emailed everyone, there are only 3 things you can do to get a response from the bank (and ideally an offer):

1. Win Other, Exploding Offers and Let Them Know About Your Deadlines

Just like the high school social scene, the job search process is also a popularity contest.

The moment you get an offer from another bank, you immediately become more attractive to everyone else and you’re more likely to receive definitive responses.

To turn a “maybe” or “soft no” into a “yes,” though, you need to be certain this bank really is your first choice – and then send a message like the following:

“Hi [Name],

Thanks again for taking the time to interview me last week. I enjoyed meeting everyone, and [Bank Name] is definitely my top choice.

I just wanted to let you know that I received an offer from [Other Bank Name], and it expires on [Imminent Date] – if I received an offer at your firm, I would accept it right away, but I must respond to the other offer by [Imminent Date].

It would be great if you could let me know my offer status at your firm and what else, if anything, you need from me in order to make a decision.

Thanks,

[Your Name]”

But this is easier said than done, and most likely you’re “on the fence” at a few firms.

2. Become a More Attractive Candidate So the Bank Reconsiders You

This one is tougher because you probably can’t go from “OK” to “spectacular” overnight – but if some time has passed and you’ve genuinely improved, it can work.

This works particularly well for lateral interviews, since there is no fixed timeline and the process tends to drag on and on and on and on.

Example: One customer last year applied to a bank as part of the lateral hiring process, and made it through several rounds of interviews. Then they asked her to submit a sample financial model she had worked on before.

She didn’t have any great examples due to lack of experience with integrated 3-statement projection models, so they gave her a “soft no” and said that they were some “concerns” over her technical skills.

She then signed up for one of our courses, went through the whole thing, and got much better templates and examples to use – which she then used for a different company.

She went back to the bank and said, “I know we spoke XX months ago and you felt my technical skills were not strong enough. Since then, however, I’ve taken several courses and sharpened my skills, and I’m attaching to this email an example of the work product I can produce.”

Then, they responded and re-started the process, bringing her back for additional interviews.

If they had concerns about something qualitative, like your communication or writing skills, you could attach a report, paper, or presentation you drafted recently.

This is trickier to pull off if they gave you a “soft no” due to “lack of cultural fit” or something else that you cannot easily fix.

But if it is something you can fix, and you’ve pinpointed exactly why they had reservations about you, it’s always worth a shot.

3. Keep Following Up to Ask Exactly Why They Said “No” Directly or Indirectly

HR often gives useless responses, so you should go directly to the bankers you spoke with – and the Analysts and Associates are sometimes more upfront about why you were put “on hold.”

This method also handles the case where something stupid or something beyond your control happened: they lost your contact information, they “forgot” to respond to you, there was a hiring freeze, or the group shut down.

So you need to follow-up anyway – but many people hesitate to ask exactly why they did not receive an offer.

Let’s say you email one of the Associates you spoke with and he says he doesn’t know what your status is… so you call him after another week passes.

Associate: “Hey, I’m just not sure yet… did you ask HR?”

You: “I did, and I’m aware I should go to them first, but I wanted to go directly to you and ask you for feedback since you interviewed me.”

Associate: “OK… what would you like to know?”

You: “I’m aware that I haven’t been officially rejected, but that other candidates probably performed better – I just wanted to know if you had any feedback on what I could do to improve, what would make me a more attractive candidate for your firm, and what would allow you to make a decision more quickly.”

I’ve seen some suggestions that this approach is “too aggressive,” but I completely disagree – if you don’t ask, you’ll never know.

And if it wasn’t an outright rejection, chances are they liked something about you.

Once you get a hint of what went wrong, you can get to work on method #2 above and start fixing the issue – whether it’s your technical skills, a lack of enthusiasm, your communication abilities, or anything else.

Overcoming the Silent Treatment

Let’s return to that story in the beginning.

Do you really want to spend 143+ hours preparing for interviews, and then fail to get an offer because you’re not aggressive enough with your follow-up afterward?

I hope not.

So right after that VP shakes your hand, don’t just meekly go home and wait weeks and weeks for a response.

Follow-up with him and everyone else within 2 days, AT MOST, if you don’t hear back.

And if they keep stringing you along even after several follow-ups, ask them directly what you can do to improve or what their specific concerns about you are – and then address them.

Maybe you won’t have the time or resources to win the offer this time around…

But you can always accept something else, fix those flaws in the meantime, and make another run at it next time around.

Silence: it may not be golden, but it is beatable.

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Nassim Taleb called it a "black swan." Donald Rumsfeld went with "unknown unknown."

But in Wall Street parlance, the likelihood of a low-probability, highly-catastrophic event is known as "tail risk."

Perhaps that's why Goldman Sachs embeds a tail-risk question in the interview process for an internship (which can often turn into a job), according to a new book by New York Magazine's Kevin Roose. In "Young Money," Roose follows a crop of would-be bankers and traders as they navigate post-crisis Wall Street. One lands an interview with Goldman, where he's asked this question:

Here's a game I've just invented. The rules are that I flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, you pay me a dollar and the game is over. If it comes up tails, you flip again. If it comes up heads the second time, you pay me two dollars, and the game is over. If it comes up tails again, you flip again. Third time, you pay me four dollars for heads and the game is over, and you flip again for tails. And so on and so on, each time doubling the payout for heads, and flipping again on tails. How much would I have to pay you up front to play this game?

As Roose notes, there's no real right answer, but it's a telling question nonetheless. What you say shows your risk appetite. It's a version of Martingale, an 18th century French betting game.

In the wake of the financial crisis — the industry's most harrowing reality check since 1929 — understanding tail risk became increasingly necessary for Wall Street neophytes, lest they make the same mistakes as their subprime mortgage-happy predecessors.

"A candidate who said he'd need only a dollar to play probably wasn't thinking through the tail-risk scenarios carefully," writes Roose. "While a candidate who answered with too big a number was being excessively cautious."

You want to be right in the middle to land that Goldman Sachs gig.

SEE ALSO: Here's What You Learn If You Follow Eight Young Bankers Around For Two Years

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Trading has been halted on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange... just kidding!   

But really, Sports Illustrated swimsuit models are down there right now, so we can imagine it's pretty easy to get distracted. 

It's also the 50th Swimsuit Issue for the sports magazine. 

Check out the Tweets/pics from @NYSEcam.

New career for @SI_swimsuit covergirl @ChrissyTeigen: #NYSE Trader? pic.twitter.com/m4stGKgwpC

— NYSEcam (@NYSEcam) February 18, 2014

.@SI_swimsuit covergirls @ChrissyTeigen@NinaAgdal& @LilyAldridge#suitup to visit the #NYSEpic.twitter.com/WUtMZSnClF

— NYSEcam (@NYSEcam) February 18, 2014

#NYSE#selfie: @SI_swimsuit covergirls @ChrissyTeigen@NinaAgdal& @LilyAldridge on @CNBCpic.twitter.com/iuWPxZfRZz

— NYSEcam (@NYSEcam) February 18, 2014

The difference between @carlquintanilla& me: He gets to intvw @SInow swimsuit models @NYSE , and I get @PeterPCostapic.twitter.com/si1tB44lJl

— Bill Griffeth (@BillGriffeth) February 18, 2014

Also, CNBC anchor Carl Quintanilla took a selfie with the models.

The @SI_swimsuit ladies, at @nyseeuronext. @CNBC@chrissyteigen@lilyaldridge@ninaagdalpic.twitter.com/vrjywsc7Xg

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) February 18, 2014

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Banker Julia Kadioglu was arrested last month for allegedly hitting a guy on the head with a beer bottle in an NYC night club, the New York Post reports citing unnamed police sources.

According to the report, Kadioglu's date Till Bechtolsheimer bumped into Daniel Kurkowski on the dancefloor. Kurkowski allegedly shoved Bechtolsheimer back before Kadioglu allegedly hit him with her Stella Artois bottle, the report said.

The alleged incident happened at Dream Hotel's Electric Room in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood on January 19th. Kadioglu was taken out of the club in handcuffs, the report said. 

Kadioglu's attorney told the Post that his client is innocent.  

The Post report said that Kadioglu works at HSBC. 

We tried emailing Kadioglu at her HSBC email address and received a delivery failure message. We also called Kadioglu's desk at HSBC and were told that she's no longer there.

Kadioglu left the bank in the first half of 2013, Business Insider has learned.  

HSBC declined to comment. 

Kadioglu's Linkedin profile says that she works in derivatives and structured products at HSBC. FINRA records show that she's been employed by HSBC both in London and New York since 2005.

She also attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland from 2001 until 2005, the records show.  She was at the prestigious university during the same time as Prince William and Kate Middleton. 

She's also a runner and a triathlete, race records on website Athlinks show. She has some pretty solid race times, too. 

She also volunteers with the Bowery Mission. 

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I moved to New York in 1994, aged 24, looking for a job in PR or journalism. It wasn’t working and I was getting very frustrated, so my mum suggested I call my uncle, who knew all about finance. I had no idea about Wall Street but he arranged a few interviews for me. The first one was at Lehman Brothers. There was something about the grandness of the trading floor I was instantly attracted to. I knew I wanted the money and the lifestyle; I knew I wanted in.

I didn't get the Lehman Brothers role, but I did get a job working for Morgan Stanley as a sales assistant, which is like a glorified secretary. But a few years later I moved onto the ‘buy side’, investing and managing other people's money for hedge fund firm Galleon Group. We would have this huge pot of commission from private investors or institutions, and the rest of Wall Street was fighting for part of that pot. Everyone wanted my business and they would do anything to get it. I had access to every single restaurant, club and sporting event.

Soon I was making as much as $2m a year and being taken all over the country by people who wanted me to work with them. The benchmark for parties was the Super Bowl trip, which usually involved a private jet and every expense paid. One of the wildest was in 2002, in Ohio. I got invited to this super-underground party with about 40 guys and the same number of women. When I got there - I don’t know whether it was the cologne I was wearing or what - literally every single woman in the place wanted me. I was on fire. Everything I said was funny. It was only later I found out that all of them were hired escorts.

The first time I was offered cocaine was during the same period as the Ohio trip. I went to the bathroom with it but I didn’t take any - just pretended I had and handed it back. There was this ‘80s basketball player called Len Bias who took it for the first time and died when I was a teenager, so I’d always thought 'you take cocaine, you die'. But six months and a couple of promotions later, I was hanging around with a faster crowd and it didn’t look so menacing. The first time I really took cocaine, it was the most amazing thing ever. It was so good I knew it was going to be a problem.

By 2006 I was spending between $600-$700 a week on cocaine - that didn’t include the large amount I was being given or the booze I was drinking with it. I had a girlfriend and a baby daughter by that time but these were dark days. I was taking it five or six nights a week; if I took it easy I wouldn’t be shaking, sweating or bleeding the next day - but I still wouldn’t be able to go into work.

There was one point when I’d been up for about three days on cocaine and alcohol. I’d called in sick so many times that year that I knew I'd be fired if I did it again; I also knew I'd be fired if I showed up in the state I was in. I remember circling the block around my office, wondering what to do. I told myself (I obviously wasn’t having rational thoughts) that if I’d been mugged they wouldn’t expect me to work. I ran a few blocks and threw myself into a puddle repeatedly until my trousers were ripped and my hands and knees were all bloody. I got into the office limping and soaking wet, barely able to speak, and told them I’d been attacked.

Needless to say, 72 hours later I had left my job and was on a plane to my first rehab.

I was clean for a year before I relapsed and had to go back to rehab. After that I had the option of going back to Wall Street for a seven-figure paycheck, but it just didn’t feel right. I sabotaged the interview and walked away.

I don’t know if I have any regrets from that whole period. I do wish that maybe I hadn’t hurt some people, especially my family, but I don’t think I could be the person I am today without everything I went through.

Now I’m a writer - I turned my time on Wall Street into a book called The Buy Side and have just submitted a paranormal thriller - and I live on Long Island, two miles away from my daughter, who’s eight, so I can see her everyday. When I was writing the first book I made sure there were no cliches in the language, but I realized my character had become the biggest cliche there is - the stereotypical Wall Street douche-bag. Nothing’s left of the $10m I earned there; I made some bad investments and the rest went along the way.

But here’s another cliche: money’s not going to bring you happiness and none of the things I had made me feel better on the inside.

The Buy Side by Turney Duff is published in paperback by Constable and Robinson and available for £12.99

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In the spirit of the Winter Olympics, we've decided to track down some of the top ski racers who are now working on Wall Street. 

We've found folks who competed in the Olympics and others who were World Cup medalists. We found many skiers who were captains of their college teams.

We've also found some younger skiers who are heading to Wall Street when they're finished with school.

These alpine skiers have swapped running gates for putting together financial models and analyst reports. They can still hit the slopes on the weekends, though.  One of the skiers on our list happens to own a ski area, too.

If you know of other skiers who should be included, feel free to send an email to jlaroche@businessinsider.com. Please include a photo and a brief bio of ski highlights. 

RBC Capital Markets director Ed Podivinsky won the bronze medal in Lillehammer in 1994.

Finance Job: Ed Podivinsky is a director in the institutional equity division of RBC Capital Markets.

Ski Highlights: He represented Canada in three Olympic games.  He won the bronze medal medal at the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer.

Blackstone exec James 'Jim' Schaefer was captain of University of Vermont's 1990 NCAA Championship team.

Finance Job: He's a Senior Managing Director/Global Head of Energy, Power & Renewables at Blackstone.

Education: University of Vermont

Ski Highlights: James "Jim" Schaefer raced for the University of Vermont from 1986 to 1990. He was captain of the 1990 NCAA National Championship team. Prior to UVM, he was New England prep school champion for Eaglebrook and Deerfield Academy from 1983-1986.  Schaefer raced in regional USSA races, Eastern Cup and NorAm events as well as at US Nationals. Schaefer was Eastern Cup Slalom champion in 1991. He also coached the New Zealand ski team and served as head coach at Mt. Hutt in 1991 and 1992. While at grad school Jim was an All American at the University of Michigan on the NCSA tour in 1994.  Jim raced occasionally until 2005 at regional USSA races in New England. 

UBS managing director Alexander 'Sandy' Williams competed in the 1988 Olympics in Calgary as a member of the U.S. Ski Team.

Finance Job: Williams is a managing director at UBS Private Wealth Management in New York with over 19 years of experience in financial services. Before UBS, he worked at Morgan Stanley's wealth management division. 

Education:  University of Rochester (undergrad), UPenn Wharton (MBA)

Ski Highlights: Williams competed in the 1988 Olympics in Calgary. He was a member of the US Ski Team from 1982 to 1992.  

Over a few beers after work one spring evening, two junior Goldman Sachs employees started contemplating the best ways to kill themselves.

“If the goal is, like, how do I inflict maximum psychological damage, then I think just going up to your desk and blowing your brains out in the middle of the day would be the best,” said Jeremy Miller-Reed, 23.

“Nah,” said Samson White, 22. “You know what would happen? All the other analysts would get an e-mail from the associates saying, ‘Can you guys clean this up?’ And then everyone would go back to work.”

Jeremy and Samson — I’ve change their names to protect their anonymity — were first-year analysts at Goldman. They’d arrived from their Ivy League campuses less than a year before, fresh-faced and idealistic. Jeremy had gotten placed in commodities, and Samson had made a home in the firm’s mortgage division. Good friends since their summer internships the year before, they’d been excited, at first, to join the ranks and get to work making money. But quickly, their enthusiasm had been buried underneath massive piles of work, grueling hours, and unforgiving bosses. In one particularly bleak moment, they’d started calling Goldman’s downtown headquarters “Azkaban,” after the prison in the Harry Potter series where inmates’ souls are sucked from their bodies.

For my new book, Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits, I spent three years shadowing eight young Wall Street workers, including Jeremy and Samson. Given the rollicking depictions of finance life we see in movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, and the fact that these jobs are extremely well-paid — first-year investment bankers make anywhere from $90,000 to $140,000, including year-end bonuses — you might think that my eight banker informants were living the good life. But in three years, hardly an interview went by without a young banker confessing his or her struggles with depression and health problems, expressing a desire to quit, or simply complaining about how working in finance was ruining the pleasures of normal life.

Why are young bankers so uniformly miserable? After spending many, many hours in their company, I think at least three factors explain why Wall Street is a singularly unpleasant place for young people to work.

1. The Hours

Wall Street is notorious for the long hours it imposes on its worker bees. (One young banker bragged to me about working the “banker 9-to-5,” defined as 9 a.m. until 5 a.m. the next day.) But lots of professions — law and medicine, to name just two — work their underlings hard. What makes banking different is that the work can arrive at any moment, unannounced and requiring immediate attention. If a client needs a PowerPoint presentation at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning, a junior banker will have to wake up and get to the office.

What this means, in practice, is that young bankers live in a state of perpetual anxiety, and advance planning becomes impossible. Boyfriends and girlfriends get upset about broken dinner plans, friends and family members become estranged, and phones function as third limbs. This unpredictability, combined with the sheer number of hours involved, takes a toll. A recent academic study of young bankers by a University of Southern California business school professor named Alexandra Michel underscored the vital, even bodily, nature of the transformation that is taking place during a banker’s first years. Michel wrote:

During years 1–3, bankers construed their bodies as objects that the mind controls. They worked long hours, neglected family and hobbies, and fought their [bodies’] needs in order to enhance productivity. They suppressed the need for prolonged sleep, taking “naps at 11 p.m. and then again at 1, 3, and 4.” When I asked, “Aren’t you worried that this will affect your health?” most responded like this Bank A associate: “For the next few years, work has priority. I’ll worry about my health then.” To my question, “What if you do irreversible damage?” many answered, ‘‘I am willing to take that risk.”

Recently, Wall Street banks have tried to ease up on young workers by, in many cases, giving them the weekends off. But will the new rules really mean a lighter workload? Or will the weekdays become even more painful to make up for missed Saturdays?

2. Money

All eight of the young bankers I followed entered the financial industry after the crash of 2008 and saw a wildly different scene than they’d imagined as college students. Thousands of bankers were being laid off, firms were chopping off entire divisions, and pay for everyone had come down to levels that, while still lucrative by any real-world measure, were far lower than they’d been before the crash.

For young Wall Street bankers, who often get themselves through tough stretches by imagining their year-end bonuses arriving, the post-crash uncertainty was destabilizing. Once, it had been relatively certain that a young banker or trader who did well would earn much more with each passing year, and would eventually become a millionaire, probably before his or her 30th birthday. But after 2008, the golden pathway began to splinter. New regulation meant to prevent another financial crisis made banks less profitable, and the struggling markets meant that even young bankers — who had historically been immune from layoffs during downturns, so cheap was their labor compared to that of senior bankers — were at risk of losing it all. 

One Goldman Sachs analyst explained to me the effect the layoffs and cost-cuts had on the psyches of the sector’s youth.

“You’re working with this constant fear,” he said. “You go to this bulletproof firm, it gives you a ton of options, and it’s really self-validating. And then all of the sudden, you have no options, you’re not getting paid nearly as much as you thought, and you might get fired. And then you start thinking, Well, shit, I could be halfway through law school, and instead I’m in New York dicking around doing models and bottles, and at the end of it I won’t even have that much to show for it.”

The markets have since recovered, as has profitability at some of the Wall Street firms damaged during the crisis. But young Wall Street hasn’t regained its sense of security. It might take a while.

3. Purpose

It might sound strange, but many young people come to Wall Street expecting to make the world a better place. This is partly the fault of recruiters, who tempt college juniors and seniors with promises of “real-world responsibility” and rhapsodies about socially responsible investing. But it’s also wishful thinking on the recruits’ part. Jeremy, for instance, had arrived at Goldman thinking that his specific job — trading commodities derivatives — could make the world a teensy bit better by allowing large companies to hedge their costs, and pass savings along to customers. But one day, his boss pulled him aside and told him that, in effect, he’d been naïve.

“We’re not here to save the world,” the boss said. “We exist to make money.”

The British economist Roger Bootle has written about the difference between “creative” and “distributive” work. Creative work, Bootle says, is work that brings something new into the world that adds to the total available to everyone (a doctor treating patients, an artist making sculptures). Distributive work, on the other hand, only carries the possibility of beating out competitors and winning a bigger share of a fixed-size market. Bootle explains that although many jobs in modern society consist of distributive work, there is something intrinsically happier about a society that skews in favor of the creative.

“There are some people who may derive active delight from the knowledge that their working life is devoted to making sure that someone else loses, but most people do not function that way,” he writes. “They like to have a sense of worth, and that sense usually comes from the belief that they are contributing to society.”

During my interviews with young bankers, I heard a lot of them express this exact sentiment. They wanted to do something, make something, add something to the world, instead of simply serving as well-paid financial intermediaries at giant investment banks. It doesn’t hurt that creative jobs — including, but not limited to, jobs with Silicon Valley tech companies — are now considered sexier and more socially acceptable than Wall Street jobs, which still carry the stigma of the financial crisis. At one point, during the Occupy Wall Street protests, Jeremy told me that he had begun camouflaging his Goldman affiliation in public.

“I lie whenever I go out now,” he told me. “I tell people I’m a consultant, a lawyer, whatever — anything but a Wall Street guy.”

I won’t spoil the end for you — you’ll have to read the book to find out how Jeremy and Samson ended up coping with their dissatisfaction — but suffice it to say that they both found creative work that satisfied their desire to make a difference while still providing financial stability and drawing upon their well-honed business skills. For them, and for countless other young Wall Streeters in the post-crash era, the promise of a six-figure paycheck alone just doesn’t cut it anymore.

SEE ALSO: What It's Like To Earn $10M On Wall Street And Blow It All On Cocaine, Prostitutes, And Bad Investments

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I have been harsh in the past about some things William D. Cohan has written about Wall Street, specifically in this review of his book about Goldman Sachs, and this view on Fabulous Fab’s criminal conviction for just doing his job as a CDO structurer.

However, I really appreciated his Op-Ed in this weekend’s New York Times about the Wolf of Wall Street movie versus the reality of Wall Street. Cohan nails it.

The Wolf of Wall Street depicts a Hollywood version of a dark corner of the finance world – boiler rooms – that bears little resemblance to the actual Wall Street.

My colleagues generally worked too hard, had too much pride in their fancy educational pedigrees, and too much ambition to get ahead in a culture that actually punished irresponsible behavior to do the stuff that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character does in the movie.

I’m not saying there weren’t jerks – of course there were – but the point was you didn’t want to get identified inside the firm as a jerk. It was a very bad career move to get known for bad behavior.

That’s the real truth, but it obviously makes for far less exciting cinema than cocaine, prostitutes, and scamming people on purpose.

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The two investment banks that worked on the $19 billion Facebook acquisition of popular messenger app WhatsApp could make more than $80 million in advisory fees, according to preliminary estimates.

Dealbook reports that M&A advisory firm Freeman Consulting Services estimates that Facebook's advisor Allen & Co. could make $32 to $41 million.

Morgan Stanley, the bank that advised WhatsApp, could make between $35 and $45 million, according to Freeman's calculations.

Morgan Stanley's co-head of global technology banking Michael Grimes—who lead Facebook's problematic initial public offering— was the banker who helped advise WhatsApp on the sale, according to Dealbook. 

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Carter Worth, the Chief Technical Analyst at Oppenheimer has left the firm for Sterne Agee.

This is big in the world of technical analysts. Worth is known for having predicted the 2007 market top to the week. He does a lot of media, and is widely known for writing what Ritholtz Wealth Management CEO Joshua Brown called The "Greatest. Research. Note. Ever."

The note simply said:"We have no thoughts. Sell."

The problem with that is that the note was dated June 24, 2013. Worth was making a strong bearish call on equities right as the stock market ripped up 30% for the year.

Since June 24th, the S&P 500 has climbed 16.35%.

In August of 2013, he was still beating the same drum.

If Worth's epic report had been published just a few months later, the whole Street might be talking about what a genius he is as we speak.

Timing is everything.

Not that he's short of fans: "He once told me that they only technical analysis book he's ever read was *Edwards & Magee, and he read it 5 times," said Eagle Bay Capital founder and fellow technical analyst J.C. Parets. "I thought that was...cool."

*Edwards and Magee is the Bible of technical analysis.

Business Insider reached out to Worth for comment, we'll update this post if we hear anything.

Read Worth's epic research report below:

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When I heard about Kevin Roose's new book, "Young Money," of course I wanted to read it — after all, "Liar’s Poker" lit the fuse on my own Wall Street aspirations.

Although I do not know Kevin personally, I am fond of his work as a writer for New York magazine (and previously as a reporter for Dealbook), and I also enjoy following him on Twitter.

What interested me most was the timing and uniqueness of Kevin's premise — shadowing a diverse group of young investment bankers (1st year analysts) for two years, as they started their careers on Wall Street in the immediate wake of the financial crisis.

The book does not fail to deliver, and Kevin’s conclusions present a fascinating reality and perspective of young Wall Street life today that I think everyone will find intriguing. It’s also a great case study on entitled Millennials, or Generation Wuss, as Bret Easton Ellis has recently described them.

There’s been a huge amount of fanfare and media attention around a few of Kevin’s observations and conclusions:
 •  Wall Street culture is still somewhat odious (and possibly contagious). 
 •  The lives of young bankers tend to be pretty dreadful — where "glamour meets masochism" as Roose puts it, but the glamour and prestige are gone.
 •  Worse, the prospects for a viable and fulfilling (personally and financially) career on Wall Street are "eroding."
 •  Wall Street is no longer the default destination of our best, brightest, and most ambitious — a fact that is clearly supported by Roose, anecdotally and statistically.

With all of the other glowing reviews, there’s not much for me to add ... So I thought I would take a stand, and make a defense of Wall Street.

Young Wall Street Life is Hell ...

Yes, the life of a young analyst on Wall Street can be miserable. With the help of his eight analyst-subjects, Roose paints a very accurate portrait of the often soul-destroying 100-hour workweeks, tyrannical bosses, and menial Excel and PowerPoint work that the job encompasses.

I spent my first year in absolute misery, sitting in an analyst bullpen in M&A, taking orders from my ass-kissing Associate staffer. I suffered through insanely and needlessly long hours, juggling face time, monkey work, and bogus fire drills initiated by an insecure VP, all while being stifled by an absurdly rigid hierarchy.

But all of that bulls--- aside, the firm invested a significant amount of resources in developing and training me; Wall Street has one of the most prestigious training programs on the planet. They assigned me formal and informal mentors — people who make $3-$5 million dollars a year, at my disposal, to help guide me not only my career, but also in life.

That’s why, when I hated M&A, I stuck it out. I did my best. And then at the end of the year, I was ranked (and paid) at the top of my class. And so with the help of my mentor, rather than risk losing me, the firm happily made room for me in the team of my choice.

Within no time, I was on the trading floor, with four screens, a dealerboard, a Bloomberg terminal, and near infinite resources at my fingertips. There was no hierarchy. Surrounded by so much energy, excitement, and hunger to make money, I was excited to come to work every day and loved every minute of it.

I was ranked at the top of my class every year, was offered the 3rd year and the promotion to associate.

Kevin explains the experiences of some of his analysts quite differently. Maybe it’s because they were placed on bulls--- desks (Municipal bonds or Public Sector Finance), were ranked and paid at the bottom of their classes, denied promotions, and in some cases made redundant. Last time I checked, the guy who never gets a date is usually the one who hates the prom most vocally.

Wall Street is bad for you ...

Not only that, the job can make you ugly and fat. Roose comments on the noticeable impact it’s having on the appearance and health of a few of his subjects.

This is a fair point. No time or energy for the gym. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner at their desks. And, it’s not only the job that has contributed to the weight gain. For many of these kids, it’s the first time in their lives that they have more money than they have time to spend it. That means whenever they’re not eating at their desk, they’re dining (and drinking) out — lavishly.

Work. Drink. Eat. Drink. Pass Out. Repeat. It’s 18th century sexy — pale skin, bloodshot eyes, a fat ass, but ... a fatter wallet.

Even with all of that face time, I still made plenty of time for the gym. The best part was sneaking in time to go during the early evening, which enabled me to justify working late enough for the free NOBU take-out and the black car service home.

Main Street Still Hates You ...

Although the pendulum is gradually swinging back toward the rational, Wall Street bankers are still viewed by many to be social pariahs — so much so that a few of Roose’s subjects are actually embarrassed to tell their friends and family that they work on Wall Street. It’s amazing to me that "I work at Goldman Sachs" could be a source of shame for a kid coming out of college in 2010.

You Will Destroy Relationships ...

There are some great moments in "Young Money" about these kids watching their relationships fall apart in slow motion, or even having to decide between a relationship and a job. Boo-hoo. I wonder how many times they wrote "#firstworldproblems" in their late-night Facebook therapy sessions with their freshman-year roommate who actually did sign up for Teach For America.

Last time I checked, that’s called life. My college relationship didn’t survive my analyst career. So I just started dating a banker. She knew all about cancelled plans, weekend conference calls, and skipping the post-coital cuddle and going straight to the Blackberry. The best part was that we never got sick of each other because we only had time to see each other a couple nights a week. And our independent schedules aligned so infrequently that I had plenty of "me time" for the nights that I just wanted to sit at home, drink a 12 pack, and play Mario Kart.

You Will Go Directly To Hell ...


Roose writes, "Jeremy came to Goldman a soft-spoken, cerebral kid, but in less than two years, he had developed [a] short temper and was quick to point out others’ mistakes in a way that was often unkind and had little patience for people whose intelligence he couldn’t respect."

I remember this transformation vividly. When I went home for the Christmas holidays during my first year as an analyst, my sister told me that I was "simply an asshole." And on my next trip home, I was instructed to walk around Wal-Mart for fifteen minutes as a way of re-acclimating to the pace of "the real world," or as I saw it at the time, an attempt to regain a more forgiving attitude toward stupidity, inefficiency, and incompetence.

In line with many of Roose’s conclusions, Wall Street can be an amoral, aggressive, and insular culture of elitist assholes that molds its disciples in that image. When it comes to work, I’m happy to be unemotional and pragmatic, and to reserve little patience for people who waste my time. I wish I had the luxury to be something else.

"I leave the Hamptons on Sundays, so that my family doesn't have to."

Over time, I learned to never let a job define me as a human being.
 
Roose seems genuinely concerned that his subjects will be transformed into one of these vapid money and power-obsessed drones, "slower to smile, quicker to criticize." Toward the end, he even seems to chastise Derrick for possibly falling under Wall Street’s evil spell. I saw it coming — the kid kept tombstones (lucite deal trophies) in his bedroom, and seemingly uses douchey phrases like "models and bottles" to describe his nightlife.

So Why Go to Wall Street ...

Kevin gives some great insights on a point that I think is widely misunderstood: How and why do people (especially today) end up on Wall Street?

Besides the influence of "Liar’s Poker" (and "Den of Thieves,""The Predator’s Ball,""Barbarians At The Gate," and "Highly Confident"), my enamorment with Wall Street was reinforced in prep school when all the parents came down from Greenwich for parents’ weekend. The Wall Street dads were the cool dads with the sports cars, and a propensity for profanity. They’d tell our Dean we were spending the weekend with them in Connecticut, only to let us to disappear into New York City. This, at the age of 14 was my first interaction with Wall Street and it taught me the No. 1 rule of life (from Douglas Bader):

"Rules are for the obedience of fools, and the guidance of wise men"

However, from what I have seen subsequently, and as Kevin clearly illustrates, my experience is not the norm. Most people go into investment banking because they obviously do well in school and are smart and ambitious, but they either have no clue what they want to do in life, or they just don't have the balls to go out there, be creative, and take a risk.

But, Wall Street isn’t for everyone ...

Roose picks an eclectic, diverse set of individuals to follow in terms of race, sex, and socioeconomic background. He even recruits a couple of kids from non-target schools who somehow manage to backdoor their way into their Analyst programs — all of which makes for great perspective in the book.

It’s a big ask and I commend him for having been successful in putting it all together. But there is an argument to be made that clearly the type of person that he might gravitate toward would be the left-leaning, cynical, reluctant bankers ... And vice versa - the type of person who would take the considerable risk in collaborating with Roose would be similarly minded.

"There are three sides to every story: Your side, my side, and 
the truth. And no one is lying."— Robert Evans

This does not make it any less true, or his conclusions any less relevant. But in my defense of Wall Street, it allows me to say that there are thousands of kids who have rewarding, fulfilling, and successful analyst experiences on Wall Street.

What about the kids at the top of the analyst classes?

One of his subjects (Chelsea) finds her co-workers boring and tedious. Maybe that’s because she got stuck on the f---ing Municipal bond desk. I’d bet her assessment might be quite different on the Emerging Market hedge fund credit sales.

A few of the others are disenfranchised to the point of depression. If I sucked at my job and got paid at the bottom of my class, I’d be pretty depressed too.

Generation Wuss ...

This leads me to my next point. Perhaps this isn’t just about Wall Street, as it is about entitled Millennials, or "Generation Wuss."

My father probably didn’t walk 8 miles to school, but I know that when I was an analyst, I had to go into the office at 2am, anytime some idiot from Asia called me wanting some US$ corporate comps, or a generic Eurobond market update. BlackBerrys had only arrived on the scene, and Bloomberg Anywhere was still a few years off.

By comparison, these analysts have it easy ... And I don’t have to get into the hazing.

In his book, the notion of "existential" comes up time and time again. The kids get high and think about life. They pound Bud Lights and think about life. They eat shroom sandwiches and think about life. Existential masturbation: a luxury of millennial generation.

I don’t have a problem with that. Kids today don’t want to eat sh-t for two or three years, especially when the long-term guarantee of financial success and prestige on Wall Street has evaporated. That’s fine; there’s the door.

Many kids today would be better off pursuing other career paths, and society would be better off too.

I concede that there are plenty of douchebags on Wall Street ...

Once again, full credit to Roose for making sure he looks at the picture from every possible angle, in what he calls his "douchebag deficit." To compensate for the fact that his subjects seem balanced in their cynicism, he crashes a Fashion Meets Finance mixer, in one of the more hilarious moments in the book. Just imagine listening to a guy talk about "joining The Street after B-school," and when referring to a new watch (probably a Hublot), saying something like, "Yup. You noticed, huh. Just test-driving the new piece." (I’m exaggerating Roose’s story, but it’s still fantastic.)

Roose nails it ... And I wish I had been right there with him taking notes, to the extent that @GSElevator often highlight certain less flattering aspects of Wall Street culture:

"Some chick asked me what I’d do with $10 million bucks.
 I told her I’d wonder where the rest of my money went."

I guarantee every female in Manhattan will laugh out loud when they read this chapter.

Wall Street is losing talent ...

Roose points out some fascinating statistics. His trips to recruiting sessions at Wharton, Princeton, Yale, and Harvard make for some really insightful reading and perspective. And I credit Roose in his attempts to objectively look at all aspects of the story, well beyond the anecdotes and experiences of his eight subjects.

I’m in full agreement with Roose. It’s clear that matriculation is down. Wall Street is still recovering and/or adjusting to the new paradigm — and smaller analyst classes will reflect that. And tech is as hot as I’ve seen since I let the Money Honey, David Faber, and Mark Haines dictate my intraday E*TRADE decisions in college.

Roose is absolutely correct that this is great for society. But I would also say that it’s not so bad for Wall Street either. There’s no point wasting time on the people who can’t hack it, don’t know what they’re getting in to, or don’t want to be there (other than to suck out a six figure paycheck and bitch about it.)


Kappa Beta Ph-uck You ...

Kevin’s story about sneaking into the annual induction ceremony of Wall Street’s (somewhat) secretive and exclusive fraternity, Kappa Beta Phi is incredible:

"What we learn isn't pretty. The event consisted of a stream of sexist and homophobic remarks, along with jokes mocking poor people and belittling Wall Street's critics. And, of course, there was a lot of bragging by the industry leaders about their wealth and status."

This event, in January of 2012, isn’t particularly defensible. I’m broadly in agreement with everything that has been said about it. It’s vulgar, insensitive, and stupid.

But really ... Sexist, bigoted, racist, homophobic, classist remarks from a bunch of rich, white guys getting drunk and celebrating themselves. Why is anyone surprised?

That’s like being flabbergasted that some backwoods, redneck, duck hunting Christian zealot has some extreme and antiquated views on gays. There’s a shock.

Don’t get me wrong. Having a roast and making fun of each other is one thing, but telling jokes about the 99% or having unlimited access to bailout money is just as Roose concludes, "a gargantuan middle finger to Main Street."

But, in my opinion, the most offensive thing we learn from this is that their jokes are terribly stupid and unfunny. And it’s even more worrisome is that these Grand Wizards are so obtuse and self-absorbed that they allowed an unknown face, less than half the average age, to sit with them, unnoticed, for two hours, in a shitty rental tuxedo.

But as I said, I’m not surprised. If anything, it sounds like some of our team dinners, or one of my tweets:

"I never give money to homeless people. I can't reward failure in good conscience."

"My garbage disposal eats better than most people"

"Riding the subway reminds me why I am pro choice"


"He’s definitely gay. His 'EBITDA' sounds more like 'Ibiza’."

Roose says he is scared that the "thoughtful, socially conscious young analysts" he knows will end up like that. But "if it becomes the kind of antiquated, pitiful event that draws grimaces and eye rolls, maybe’s there’s hope for the New Wall Street after all."

Fat chance. He should read the endless stream tweets I get from college-aged kids in response to something particularly offensive or odious on @GSElevator — along the lines of "This makes me want to work at Goldman Sachs."

In Conclusion ...

Roose might just get a Nobel Prize for his contribution to society by convincing many of our best, brightest, and most ambitious minds not to waste their time and talents on Wall Street.

Young Money should be required reading for any college student pursuing a career in finance, and especially for any student who is thinking about a career on Wall Street because they aren’t sure what they really want to do.

I’m with Kevin; go out west and enjoy the cache of Silicon Valley. Forget about your tyrannical psychopathic boss on Wall Street, and then go work for the next Steve Jobs. (Because, he wasn’t like that at all.)

It’s great to be creative. Just make sure you’re on the right side of the casting couch. Go ahead and join Google or Apple. Just make sure you’re not the guy trapped in a Foxconn compound or the slave digging up Europium.

After all, yesterday's headline of "BofA Said to Boost CEO’s Compensation 17% to $14 Million" was quickly eclipsed by "Facebook Is Buying Messaging App WhatsApp For $19 Billion."

Has Wall Street really changed? Yes, and no ... But we’ll be okay.

That reminds me of a story from the early 2000s. We replaced the contents of a junior colleague’s suitcase with a metal spatula (bent into the shape of a gun) and a mountain of gay porn. It turned out to be quite a nice little surprise for some TSA agent and our unsuspecting associate. But today, in the softer, post-crisis Wall Street era, we’d probably think twice about a stunt like that .... This time around, we’d make sure to use gay, straight, and transgender porn.

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