The PATH Runs Every 30 minutes!?!

Every year a fresh new crop of Ivy League graduates descends on Wall Street.  Hired into a pool of analysts, these bright-eyed individuals start out their careers as sales assistants, research assistants, or trading assistants.  They fill out the lowest rungs of the trading floor.  Only a few will succeed and advance to the point where they become a senior sales person, a research analyst, or a trader.  What separates those who succeed from those who fail?  Mostly it’s how well you handle adversity and how well you fit in with your team.  My odyssey on Wall Street began in sales, which I will touch on later, and ended in trading.  In both sales and trading I began at the bottom as an assistant. 

On my first day as a trading assistant my new boss, Lars, told me to show up the next morning at 6:30 a.m.  This seemed exceedingly early to me, (as a sales assistant, I had been showing up each morning around 7:15 and was usually the first person from sales onto the floor) but I wanted to trade with every fiber of my being, so rather than protest I quickly agreed.  Having never taken the train into Manhattan that early before, I assumed that if I arrived at the PATH station in Hoboken 30 minutes before I needed to get to work, I would have no problem making it to The World Financial Center by 6:30. 

So, the next morning I set out for the train and arrived just after 6:00 to see The World Trade Center train pulling away.  No worries I thought, another train will be along in 5-10 minutes.  Wrong!  That early in the morning the PATH trains only run every 30minutes, not the every 5-10 minutes I was used to.  Each moment that passed my anxiety level increased.  By the time the train pulled up, thankfully for me a little early, I was at my wits end.  It was now 6:20a.m.  The trip across the river only takes about 10minutes and I spent the whole time calculating how quickly I was going to be able to race through The World Trade Center, over the bridge to The World Financial Center, and up to the trading floor. 

When I reached my desk at about 6:40, I was out of breath.  Without looking up Lars said, “Traders start the day at 6:30, you’re in sales again today.”  With my shoulders slumped I dragged myself back over to my old desk in sales.  The whole trading floor was in tears.  Thankfully my old sales colleagues were understanding and let me spend another day helping them out.  I never again missed that 6:00 train.  As it turns out Lars also rode the 6:00 train each morning.  It soon became part of our daily ritual to sit in the same car and same seats as he passed on his trading wisdom to me.

Years later Wall Street had changed a lot.  The “Ivy League Pinheads” had started to take over as derivatives became more widely used.  I had moved on to trading my own book and a new crop of analysts came onto the floor.  As luck would have it Lars needed a new trading assistant.  The new trading assistant he hired, Kyle, was from a very different background than me and as Lars would find out was well connected in the firm.

Some things never change, and Lars told Kyle that he needed to be in to work each day at 6:30.  Well just like it had been for me, arriving to work at 6:30 is a hard thing for those who aren’t used to it.  A few days into his new job and after a few beers in a bar, Kyle overslept and didn’t arrive to work until 7:15.  In the way that only Lars could, he told Kyle to go home for the day.  “If you can’t make it in by 6:30, you can’t sit with me.”  Unlike me, Kyle had just started at the firm so he had nowhere to go.  Also being well connected in the firm, Kyle was not going to tolerate this sort of treatment.  He immediately went to HR. 

Rather than being laughed out of the HR office as he would have been years earlier, HR took his complaint very seriously.  Lars was called off the floor to appear in the HR office.  Infuriated by the nerve of his new first year analyst, quite a few names were thrown around as Lars headed off the floor.  Many would stick as nicknames for Kyle, for the rest of his career.  HR demanded that Kyle be treated fairly and be allowed to sit on the trading floor.  An irreparable rift had now formed between Kyle and Lars, and it wasn’t much longer until Kyle left the firm.

The blue collar work ethic and the locker room atmosphere of Wall Street was slowly crumbling.  In its place was emerging a kinder, gentler, more politically correct Wall Street.  Really.