Sunday, April 18, 2010

Futures, Phones, Finance, and Philistines

My job at the hedge fund consisted of two things: data entry and answering the phone. I had done both of these before, but this was by far the worst way to experience either one.

I used to like data entry. In the fall of 2003, when I was fresh out of college, I had a temp job at a title insurance company. They needed extra help because everyone and their mother was taking advantage of the reduced interest rates and refinancing their homes, and all the lawyers in Massachusetts were sending them brand new title insurance policies that had to be processed. My job was to look at the check that the lawyers had sent to the insurance company, look at total amount of the policy attached to that check, and derive what kind of policy it was from the way the two numbers related. Then I would enter the policy into their software system and endorse the check with a stamp. I did the same thing all day, every day, and I didn’t mind it. Each check and policy was like a little puzzle, and I liked figuring it out.

Not surprisingly, data entry is a lot less interesting when you don’t understand the data you are entering. I entered some very complex stuff into spreadsheets at the hedge fund, and I had no idea what any of it meant. The woman training me told me to look at a website called investopedia.com to help me figure out what was going on. This was enormously disappointing. I read the definition of a future and an option over and over again and I still had no idea what they were. This was the first time I had ever really come up against a concept that my brain simply did not get. It was as though the synapses refused to fire, refused to communicate such abhorrent and base concepts. I admit it; I found the whole thing a little distasteful. Even in the face of certain unemployment (or at least certain underemployment in a retail setting) I regarded the world of finance like a sophomore English major regards econ classes: strictly for philistines.

In short, no job has ever before made me realize that I am, in fact, a creative person. This was, in many ways, a positive thing. It buoyed me up. Justified to some degree all the choices I had made in my life so far. And, I thought, justified those disdainful thoughts I had towards econ classes when I was a sophomore English major.

Worse than the data entry were the phone calls, and not just because they were phone calls and I don’t like phones. It always started with Bloomberg TV. Someone would interview the hedge fund’s famous stock Savant, also a famous author of texts that would, presumably, make my brain hemorrhage if I ever attempted to read them, and this Someone would go on and on about how clever the Savant was and how his hedge fund was the best. What this Someone on Bloomberg TV didn’t mention was that the Savant’s hedge fund only invested for “institutions,” and rarely for individuals. (Although, when I did get a look at one of the funds, it looked like a whole bunch of individuals to me. But what did I know. I was above it all, anyway.)

That’s when the phone would start to ring. Always an individual, never an institution on the line. Always someone claiming to be a Qualified Investor. Always someone wanting to know the minimum investment. My job was simply to take down the contact information of the person calling and forward it on to the person who worked in investor relations. I was never to tell them anything about the company, so I couldn’t tell them that they were not nearly as qualified as they thought, since they weren’t an institution, and I also couldn’t tell them that no one would ever call them back, because they weren’t an institution. This was an incredibly tedious process. Because just about everyone who left their name and number with me expected a phone call, and when they didn’t get one, they would call a second time. The second round phone calls were generally less polite than the first round calls. And I had to answer those, as well, and take down the contact info a second time. And lie, again, and tell them someone would call back eventually.

At some point, people would give up and stop calling. And then, Someone Else would interview the Savant on Bloomberg TV and start the whole process over again.

When I asked why we couldn’t just tell people up front that they weren’t going to hear from us, I was told that they wanted to make sure they got contact info from everyone who called in case an actual billionaire called one day. Evidently, individuals become institutions as soon as they have a billion dollars.

While I hated the work, I didn’t mind my coworkers. In fact, I liked a couple of them. The Head Hedger, for example, was quite a likeable fellow. And he made me reconsider my secret conviction that finance was for philistines. When we weren’t watching our Savant on Bloomberg TV, he often played classical music in the office, and once pointed out to me that we were listening to a famous aria from Tristan and Isolde. He asked me if I knew anything about opera. I admitted that I didn’t.

No comments:

Post a Comment