Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle by John Rolfe, Peter Troob

From the Publisher

They Hit "The Street." Forget what you've read, forget what you've heard, forget what you've been taught. Monkey Business pulls off Wall Street's suspenders and gives the reader the inside skinny on real life at an investment bank, where the promised land is always one more twenty-hour workday and another lap dance away. "The Street" Hit Back. Fresh out of Wharton and Harvard business schools, John Rolfe and Peter Troob ran willingly into the open arms of investment bank giant Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette. They had signed on as foot soldiers in a white-collar army of overworked and frustrated lemmings furiously trying to spin straw into gold. They escaped with the remnants of their sanity-and, ultimately, this book. Uncensored, unsanitized, and uncut, it captures the chaotic essence of the Wall Street carnival and the outlandish personalities that make it all hum...and it will become the smartest, most entertaining investment you'll make this year.

Publishers Weekly

As eager-beaver business school students, Rolfe and Troob garnered job offers as junior associates at the elite Wall Street investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, lured by dreams of wealth, glamour and power. Readers whose fascination with Wall Street shenanigans has been fueled by Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker will find this thorough rundown of an investment bank associate's daily routine sobering. By the time Rolfe and Troob were able to discern the key fact that the "investment banking community has long been an oligopoly, with only a handful of real players with the size and scale to drive through the big deals," they were already grappling with the gritty reality of performing grunt labor in an environment ruled by despotic senior partners who called innumerable meetings to set unrealistic deadlines and make superhuman demands on anybody within screaming distance. The authors' resulting disappointment and disaffection leaps off every page. Unfortunately, they take out their frustrations with indiscriminate potshots at such easy targets as word processors ("Christopher Street fairies"), copy center personnel ("a platoon of patriotic Puerto Ricans" they offhandedly refer to as "militants") and female research analysts (whom they describe as "under-sexed, eager-to-please"). Long before the hapless authors have stooped to expressing their fury at the bank by such puerile antics as urinating into a beer bottle while seated at a banquet table at the Christmas party, readers will have had enough. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

The Standard

The Net Economy is infatuated with boy wonders. Fawning magazine stories report the musings of obscure research analysts like PaineWebber's Walter Piecyk, 28, who managed to boost Qualcomm's market cap by $25 billion in one day last December. And Vanity Fair chronicles the harrowing road shows of baby-faced CEOs.

But there's a dark side to the story: the legions of hungry, young investment bankers who make it all happen behind the scenes. Wall Street's young turks attach themselves to anything and everything that generates fees. In the late 1980s it was junk bonds and mortgage-backed securities. In the greedy 1990s and onward it's Internet stocks.

Now thanks to two recent defectors from Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, we can peek behind the curtains of these money-making machines. Their book, Monkey Business, is the funniest read since Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker, and it should give pause to anyone who comes in close contact with this rare species.

Two young MBA hopefuls, John Rolfe and Peter Troob, got sucked into Wall Street right out of Wharton and Harvard, respectively, soaked up the local color and left to tell all a short while later. The scenes are straight out of movies like Wall Street or The Boiler Room: The young associates nurse their supersize egos while their bosses try to crush them; they curse profusely and live large on four hours of sleep a night; they subsidize the strip clubs of Manhattan before Mayor Giuliani took the perk away from Wall Street.

But what do they really do for $200,000 a year? "It took our mothers six months to realize that we weren't stockbrokers, working the phones to sell crappy public offerings to unsuspecting investors," they write. "It took us another six months after that to realize that we were, in fact, selling crappy public offerings to investors." The only difference was that these two associates were shoveling the smelly deals to institutional investors, who then passed the bucket on.

Dave Barry couldn't have written a more schizophrenic tale. In a freewheeling narrative that alternates between the two men, Monkey Business lays out in exquisite detail how pitch books are developed (collaborative yet futile chaos dictated by hierarchy); how an investment bank arrives at a company's valuation (mostly guesswork driven by the desire to prove a company's march toward world domination); how to read a prospectus that an army of lawyers, bankers, accountants and managers have fought over in mind-numbing "drafting sessions" (skip everything except the financial statements). Then there's the story of a fruitless "due-diligence" trip for the junk-bond offering of an unnamed multinational wireless company, a wild goose chase over 12,000 miles through seven countries that yields little substance.

A year into their banking careers, both authors decide to chuck it all and get a life, leaving behind what they call a jungle full of commandeering baboons, dung beetles and busy monkeys. These days they work for a hedge fund, go home at 8 p.m. and toy with a Web site (www.streetmonkey.com) that pokes fun at anything Wall Street, from the relaxed dress code at Goldman Sachs to the demise of the Tiger Management hedge fund. The duo isn't working on a pitch book to take themselves public - yet.

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Excerpt

Recruiting:

The Seeds of a Dream
See the happy moron,
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were a moron—
My God, perhaps I am!

—Anonymous rhyme

In the middle of Times Square, at the intersection of Broadway and Forty-third Street, sits what was once the United States Armed Services' premiere recruiting office. The office, built almost fifty years ago, was conceived as a shining testament to the unlimited promise of a military career, positioned as it was in the middle of the Crossroads to the World. Today, though, it is only a vague reminder of what it once was. Vagrants use the back of the building to provide some relief from the summer sun, and occasional relief from a bottle of Boone's Farm. On a good day, a few listless teenagers may wander in to find out exactly how much they'll get paid to be all they can be.

With the decline of the military's once-venerable institution, however, has come a concomitant rise in another recruiting institution: the Wall Street Investment Banking Machine. From lower Manhattan to midtown, the well-oiled device hums around the clock and around the calendar. Its serpentine tentacles are rooted in nearly every well-regarded undergraduate institution in the country and all of the top business schools. The machine's sole objective: to fill the conduit with as many analysts and associates—the serfs and indentured servants of the investment banking world—as it can find.

Ultimately, as we would find out, a large part of any investment bank's success becomes a function of how many bodies it can throw at agiven piece of business, or, even more important, a potential piece of business. The effort to fill the pipeline with these bodies, therefore, is never ending.

The Analysts

At the lowest level of the investment banking hierarchy are the analysts. To find this young talent, the I-banks send their manicured young bankers out to the Whartons, Harvards, and Princetons of the world to roll out the red carpet for the top undergraduates and begin the process of destroying whatever noble ideals these youngsters may still have left. For the recruiting banker, the ideal analyst candidate is somebody with above-average intelligence, a love of money (or the capacity to learn that love), a view of the world conforming with that of the Marquis de Sade, and the willingness to work all night, every night, with a big grin on his face, like the joker from Batman.

The analysts are at the bottom of the s**t heap. They are the algae under the rim of the public toilets at the Port Authority bus station, the scum below the scum at the bottom of a beer keg. They'll spend two to three years being mentally, emotionally, and physically abused, and for that benefit they'll be well trained and extremely well compensated. No matter how bad things get, they'll never have anybody lower on the corporate totem pole to whom they can off-load their misery.

Following their two- to three-year stint, the vast majority of the analysts will either strike out for any of a handful of graduate business schools, depart the firm for other opportunities within Wall Street's financial community, or regain their sanity and elect to pursue other interests entirely. There's very little upward mobility from the analyst programs into the higher echelons of the investment bank. Analysts quickly learn, in no uncertain terms, that their days as analysts terminate after three years. To the uninitiated this may seem, at best, shortsighted and, at worst, akin to infanticide. Why jettison these young minds with two to three years of hard-core financial training? The answer is simple. The analysts have been tortured and abused for three years. They've reached the point of being dangerous. To keep them on would be to institutionalize sure seeds of discontent within the investment bank.

A majority of the analysts leave the job pissed off and with a deep-seated hatred of the investment banking institution. They learned a lot and enjoyed being paid more money than they ever thought they could make, but they also despised the work and the people that made them do it. However, amazingly, it seems that about 50 percent of those analysts who hated what they did go back into investment banking after two years in a graduate business school program. Somehow, absence makes the heart grow fonder. As with a bad injury, they tend to forget how terrible the pain was. They know it was horrible, but they just can't remember exactly how much it hurt. So these analysts go back into banking thinking that life as an associate will be different. Basically, they reinjure themselves. Troob was one of these injured veterans who decided to return for a second tour of duty.

The Associates

At the next rung up the investment banking ladder are the associates, that's what we were. You can generally assume that the associates are a happier lot than the analysts, since they have both the institutional backing and the ability to ease their own misery by heaping agony onto the analysts. Therein lies the beauty of the heirarchy. Since the investment banks are in the aforementioned practice of regularly paroling virtually the entire third-year analyst class, which class would have included any analysts with the potential for promotion to associate, the recruitment of associates and the replacement of these departing third-year analysts becomes a full-time process.

For the associates in an investment bank, there is no corresponding get-out-of-jail-free program to avail oneself of at the end of a two-to-three-year stay. There is no light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. The associates are recruited under the expectation that they know what it is they're signing on to do, and that once on board, they'll dutifully climb the corporate ladder to the top of the golden pyramid. Vice president, senior vice president, managing director. The path is clear. In reality, the attrition level for associates is fairly high. They leave for competing investment banks. They leave to work for clients of the investment bank. They leave when they realize that sex with themselves is becoming the norm. Whatever the reason, between the moles brought on board to climb the ladder, and those helicoptered in to replace the departing lemmings, the flood of fresh-faced associates is constant.

The Others—Vice President to Managing Director

Above the associates are the vice presidents, the senior vice presidents (or junior managing directors, depending on the firm), and the managing directors. The associates all have the same goals. They want to make vice president in three to four years, senior vice president in five to seven years, and managing director in seven to nine years. They all hope to be making seven figures by the time they hit managing director.

Sometimes, though, from the associates' perspective, it seems like there are just three levels in the banking hierarchy: analysts, associates, and everybody else. After all, anybody senior to an associate has the institution's divine sanction to s**t on the associate's head, and if you're the one getting s**t upon there isn't usually much reason to further subdivide the hierarchy of those doing the s**tting.

The Breeding Ground—Business Schools

The most fertile grounds for the associate recruits are the nation's graduate business schools. Due to the sheer number of recruits now requisitioned by Wall Street, the preferred hunting grounds have broadened from their original select subset of only the most arrogant Ivy League institutions of the East (i.e., Wharton, Harvard, Columbia) to include other marginally less pompous institutions. As distasteful as this decrease in the overall level of enlistees' arrogance has been for the old-line bankers, it has been driven by necessity.

The business school students, for their part, are in no way gullible victims of the evil capitalist pigs. Most have returned to business school with a sole objective: to further their career goals through exploitation of the recruiting opportunities that the business schools provide. In all fairness, it should probably be acknowledged that a small minority of the graduate business school students do in fact return to school with the accumulation of knowledge as a primary objective. Those that do, however, are swiftly enlightened and made to see the error of their ways.

The indoctrination into the money culture and the transition to job-search mode begins long before the arrival of the MBA-to-be on campus. Following the receipt of the school's acceptance letter, which goes to great lengths to assure all budding MBA candidates of their status as members of an academic aristocracy, a large packet follows in the mail.

At Wharton and Harvard, the packet was similar. It was filled with policy manuals, health care application forms, and sundry other administrative delights. The most important enclosure in the Wharton packet, however, was a pamphlet titled The MBA Placement Survey. The placement survey was a gold digger's delight. Every imaginable statistic on the recruiting success, or lack thereof, of the prior year's business school denizens was broken down and reported: percent taking jobs in given industries, percent taking jobs with given employers, percent taking jobs in given geographic regions, it was all in there. There was only one overriding statistic that really mattered to the budding MBA, though: average starting salary by industry. The first time I saw these figures, my ticker skipped a beat. I was a guy who was coming out of the advertising industry making $17,500 a year and eating black beans and rice four nights a week. There were salaries in The MBA Placement Survey with six figures, and that wasn't counting any decimal places.

We were entering the land of the obscene here. If the starting figures were up on into six-figure range, where would the madness end?

A somewhat closer look at the heavily laminated pages should have yielded another clue as to the goals and mind-sets of our future business school classmates. The two job categories snaring the highest percentage of the graduating class, management consulting and investment banking, also happened to have some of the highest starting salaries. A coincidence? I think not. Troob and I were about to jump into a velvet-walled cage with some of the greediest bastards this side of Ebeneezer Scrooge. Unfortunately, at the time, we were both wrapped up in a Richie Rich fantasy of our own. We were about to start a frenzied two-year race with America's most prized business school graduates, blindly thrashing our way toward the almighty dollar.

At Wharton, the official start to this seminal marathon was the "Welcome to Wharton" seminar during orientation week. Whatever delusions I may have had prior to this cozy little gathering were quickly dispelled. Surrounded by 750 other hearty young business schoolers in a massive auditorium, all feelings of being part of something elite, something special, began to melt away. When the progression of second-year students took the podium and began describing, in lurid detail, exactly what awaited everyone on the job-search front, the essence was laid bare. We were there for a two-year mating dance with the recruiters. What the Wharton name would get us was a shot at the best of those recruiters. Given that opportunity, though, it would be up to us to distinguish ourselves from the sea of equally qualified candidates in the seats all around us. We'd have to be willing to climb over these people while wearing golf shoes with sharpened cleats to get where we wanted—no, needed—to be. F**k camaraderie.

What I didn't realize at the time was that not everybody in that auditorium was reaching these same wrenching realizations that day. Something between a sizable minority and a majority of my new classmates that day already knew exactly what game was being played. There were bastards there who knew what awaited them, and had voluntarily come back to subject themselves to the process, all for the sake of professional advancement and the accoutrements that accompanied it.

The phenomenon, mind you, was in no way peculiar to Wharton. In fact, 350 miles to the north, at that most venerable of all institutions—the Harvard Business School—a like scene was being played out. And among the 750 dandy young recruits there was one of those bastards who knew the game. A stocky little former investment banking analyst whom I'd later come to love as we wallowed together in our collective misery paying our dues as investment banking associates at DLJ. Peter Troob.

Later, after we got to know each other, Troob would confirm my suspicion that things at Wharton and Harvard were just about the same.

Yeah, I was going through the same mating dance at Harvard Business School. However, I had a big advantage: I'd worked in investment banking before going back to business school. I'd been an analyst at Kidder Peabody. I knew the pain, I knew the long nights and the late dinners eaten in the office six nights a week.

The thing was that I had sworn off investment banking. The sixteen-hour days, the people who had institutional authority to kick my ass, the extra ten pounds I had put on since college, and my nonexistent social life. The investment banking life as a junior guy sucked and I knew it. It paid me well for a twenty-two-year-old snot-nosed brat from Duke, helped me get into Harvard, and taught me how to break out a company's financials with my eyes closed, but as I sat in Harvard Business School I promised myself that I wouldn't go back. No way. I promised myself that I would find a more rewarding career, one that made me feel good about myself. One that cleansed my soul instead of soiling it.

So why was I willing to jump right back in? That's a good question. I remember sitting with one of my good friends, Danny, in the steam room at the beginning of the school year discussing that very question. We had both come from a two-year boot camp at Kidder Peabody and we were both at HBS. Danny asked the question first.

"Troobie, are you gonna go back to banking?"

"No f****ing way, man. Are you kidding me? Kidder sucked and my life was hell. F**k banking. I'm gonna do something else."

"What?"

"I don't know, consulting or some s**t like that."

"Consulting? Making all those two-by-two charts and matrices and being shipped to some buttf**k place like Biloxi, Mississippi, to help consult some manufacturing company for two months? No thanks."

"Yeah, maybe you're right, Danny Boy. Not consulting. I'll try to get a job in a buyout fund."

"Yeah, right, Troob. Tommy Lee is only taking two guys this year and KKR is taking one. You're good, but either your dad has got to be loaded or you've got to get the managing partner laid if you want that job."

"Well, maybe I'll look at the banking jobs again."

"What! Troob, are you f***ing insane?"

"Where else am I going to make that kind of money? Anyway, it's a stepping-stone to a better job. It'll open up opportunities for me in the future. It'll help me get to the buy-side."

"Jesus, man, I don't know."

"Look, I can't discuss this anymore, Danny. I've got to get out of this steam room. My balls look like raisins."

Danny and I ended up interviewing at all the investment banking houses. We were sucked in even before the whole recruiting process began. We had fallen into the trap of money, prestige, and security. We were about to start the selling of our souls. We entered the Harvard Business School fray and away we went.

Presentations and Cocktail Parties

At Wharton, the highly scripted mating dance during which the recruiters first made contact with the recruits corresponded, by no great coincidence, with the first few weeks of classes. Rolling updates of scheduled recruiter visits were distributed to all the students on a weekly basis, and a prominent announcement heralded each day's corporate arrivals: "Coming today, Merrill Lynch in Room 1, Booze Allen in Room 2, and Johnson & Johnson in Room 3."

Subliminally, what was being said was, "Those interested in the big money will head directly to rooms 1 and 2, and anybody with a yen to learn how to market rubber nipples and non-petroleum-based sexual lubricants will kindly report to room 3." The daily routine was nothing if not consistent. The last classes of the day ended at 4:30 p.m. The first corporate presentations of the day began at 4:45 p.m. For Troob at Harvard, or for me at Wharton, it was all the same.

The recruiters' presentations were no small-time affair. More often than not, the big guns themselves came out to make the sales pitch. CEOs and presidents of America's Fortune 500 regularly swallowed their pride, pressed their suits, and shuffled past the rows of Formica-topped desks to go to the head of the class. Once there, they described in gushing terms how incredibly honored they were to be standing in front of America's finest business school students, and why their diamond-encrusted clubhouse was truly the only one to consider becoming a member of.

John Chalsty, then president and head of the Banking Group at DLJ, described just how fortunate he'd been to be able to spend the last twenty-five years of his career at DLJ. DLJ was the hottest firm on Wall Street. It employed a lot fewer bankers than Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, or First Boston, but when it came to salaries, bonuses, and sexy deals, it was the big time. It was a swank firm full of young, aggressive bankers, many of whom were ex-Drexel Burnham Lambert employees. These were the guys who'd defined Wall Street in the eighties, and they had a flair for the adventurous. They were deal makers, and junk bonds (or, in the 1990s' cleaned-up lingo, "high-yield bonds") were their forte. DLJ was the home of the high-yield bond, and high-yield bond sales were on a rapid rise. Chalsty, dressed like we imagined a banker would be—Hermes tie, handmade suit, Ferragamo shoes, and a monogrammed shirt—exhorted us in his regal South African accent:

"Just go out and do what makes you happy. It's so important to be happy in this life, I implore you, just go out and find what it is that makes you happy and really, truly satisfies you, and then don't stop until you've made all your dreams come true."

He spoke on, telling tales of his trip to Russia as a member of a governmental delegation sent to provide advice to the Russian economic and political chieftains on opening the markets to capitalism. He spoke of the professional opportunities that awaited us at DLJ, the camaraderie, the ability to realize our potential. By God, this man sounded like a genius! You could see the eager MBAs pleading, "Where do I sign? I'll polish shoes! I'll scrub toilets! I'll bugger a billy goat! I'll do anything, as long as it's with John Chalsty at DLJ!"

And then, in a moment of subtle biting wit so perfect for the moment that it made the whole room feel faint, Mr. Chalsty handed the podium over to Lou Charles, at that time head of the Equity Research and Trading Group: "I'd like to introduce Lou Charles, the head of our Equity Research and Trading department. Good God, Lou, where on earth did you get that tie? It looks like the tablecloth at the Mexican restaurant I dined at two evenings ago." The walls of the classroom literally shook with laughter. An unprecedented level of mirth! Amazing! Unprecedented hilarity! They're such good friends that they're making fun of each other right here in front of everybody! Everyone in the room was begging, "Tell me, HOW CAN I GET A JOB HERE?"

Lord, help the foolish. Within a two-year period we would have heard the identical "do what makes you happy" speech, an indistinguishable rendition of the governmental delegation to Russia story, and the very same Mexican tablecloth tie introduction line for Lou Charles a total of no less than four times. But that was later. This was the present.

In general, the recruiting presentations lasted for about an hour. A question-and-answer session usually followed. The Q&A sessions were an opportunity for the sycophants of the student body to shine. It was their opportunity to show the corporate chieftains how smart and well informed they really were, and to vie for entrance to the International Pantheon of Brownnosers.

"Sir, could you tell me whether you're planning to generate any new revenue streams through international diversification? Will the emerging markets provide an important strategic opportunity for you?"

"That was an absolutely fascinating presentation, but tell me, does your firm provide the entrepreneurial atmosphere which is so important to today's top MBA candidates?"

"I'm wondering, what competitive advantage are you able to exploit to maximize the economic value added with respect to both human and economic capital at your company?"

MBA-speak filled the air. Teamwork, mission statement, top-down approach, information age, global view, downsizing, it went on and on.

Fortunately, these sickening ass kissers represented only a minority of the entire business school population, but the antipathy that they engendered among their classmates was far-reaching. Most of the other students made no attempt to disguise their loathing for this human detritus. The reassuring element, and the one that we weren't privy to until we were on the other side of the recruiting table (sadly enough trying to cajole others into our misery as associates in banking), was that the recruiters—without exception—hated these sniveling little dogs as well.

The recruiters, after being asked one of these imbecilic questions, would generally respond with something akin to "That's an excellent, excellent question . . ." What was really going through their mind, though, as they proceeded to answer the questions, was generally more along the lines of "Come on up here, Doughboy, so I can jam this Gucci loafer so far up your ass that the tassels bounce off your tonsils."

Unfortunately for most of the recruiters, the question- and-answer session was only the second step in the entire wretched experience. A recruiter reception at which the mutual ass kissing reached even more nauseating levels generally followed the Q&A session. At these receptions, the complimentary food and booze flowed as freely as the bulls**t. It was a golden opportunity to get a full stomach, a swelled head, and a skewed sense of reality all in one place. The orgy of backslapping would have made Hulk Hogan proud.

There was a widely held misconception among the student body that going to the receptions and meeting the recruiters actually increased one's chances of later being granted an interview. However, what really mattered was experience. And so it was that something of a chicken-and-egg situation existed for those people who didn't have any relevant banking experience but who wanted to try to make the transition to becoming career bankers. Without experience, you couldn't get experience. It made life difficult. There was really only one route to redemption. That was to land a banking job during the summer between the first and second year of business school. If you were lucky enough to do so, you would have the requisite experience to land all the necessary interviews for full-time positions during your second year, and you would then be in a position to ride that gravy train straight into the sunset.

So there we were. Me, clueless about what investment banking was but willing to cut off my left nut to receive a coveted summer job offer, and Troob, an ex-analyst who knew exactly what he was getting himself into but who needed something to believe in. We both needed a vision to follow, something to aspire to. We needed a dream.

The dream was to overcome untold obstacles, become wildly successful, and have fun getting there. The vision was to stand like a giant among mere mortals. We would shoot for the stars and at least land on the moon. We would walk into the Ferrari dealership and say, "I'll buy that one." The salesperson would say, "But that's over one—" and we would cut him off and say, "Whatever it is, I'll take it." We would be rich, powerful, intellectually challenged, and happy—all by the time we were thirty. We were going to live the high life. We just knew it.

With these dreams burning in our souls we both decided to interview for any and all of the investment banking jobs out there. Lehman, Goldman, Salomon, DLJ, Merrill, First Boston, Morgan, Bear—we were coming to join the investment banking parade and travel down streets paved with gold.