The Devil's Deal

53Damn clients

‘Yes.’

‘Good work. Now get me a sausage bagel, fresh tomato, pepper

but no salt. You can forget about trading until you get my

breakfast order 100 per cent right for a week.’

Proprietary trading

Jerry’s stamina was unnerving. He was always rst in the ofce,

and had a stock of pithy phrases to show that he was the king of

the early-risers.

‘Hi,’ he’d say to anyone coming in at 6.30. ‘Great to see someone

else wants to be a winner. But remember, it’s the early bird that

gets me the coffee.’ If you turned up at 6.45 you’d get these

questions: ‘Tube not working? Or have you come straight from

a nightclub?’

Pity the fools who tried to get round Jerry’s sarcasm by offering

him a coffee at 7.15. ‘Coffee. No thanks. I’ve been drinking it all

morning.’ At 7.30 it was, ‘Time for lunch?’ At 8am it would be a

curt ‘Good evening.’

But in those days I never saw him blow up or lose his self-

composure. His verbal attacks were his way of releasing stress,

and I preferred them to those of other MDs, who regularly

bounced their phones on to my wall. And I found him genuinely

funny; especially, of course, when he was cutting down someone

other than me. He would help me by delivering short sermons

in the lift.

‘Proprietary trading uses the bank’s own capital. Traders buy and

sell nancial assets to create a prot which belongs to the bank.

Traders always believe they are smarter than other investors

(especially their clients) because of their superior intellectual

power and the huge breadth of their market knowledge. That’s

normally rubbish, but there are some areas where Saiwai has

a huge advantage over the market. Our derivative deals, for

example, are so complex that you need a PhD in maths to under-

stand them.’