Long live the Kings, the Kings are dead

Court jesters were often the sharpest minds in the land, offering sharp commentary on the state of the nation as they pranced around in their silly costumes. If you looked closely enough, you could see them scream out their opinions, snigger their criticisms and sing out their ideas in every minute mannerism. But all people see are their prancing and silly costumes, in short they were just performers putting on a show.

Court jesters remind me of Investment Bankers. They are much loved in popular culture, expensively dressed and comically overworked. They inhabit the folklore of finance. Undergraduates and MBAs alike are fed tales of the nocturnal exploits with the HR girls, strippers and hookers of every large city from Houston to Hong Kong. Their popularity has built up to a crescendo, every man and every woman who wants to be man, wants to be investment bankers: they want the big bucks, the big deals people say only investment bankers see.

If I met these "people" I would kick them in the head. Investment bankers are nothing more than number crunchers. So much so that Goldman has managed to outsource a large chunk of its investment banking business to India. This shows that there really is no need for the Hermes ties and Church shoes, but rather that these accessories are used to fill in a gaping hole in self-esteem. Like the court jesters, their indepedent ideas, their critical thinking and their incredible collective pre-banking intelligence is steadily washing down a spread-sink.

In contrast, the real players, the royalty of the finance world, are the hedge fund managers, private equity groups and proprietary trading desks of bulge bracket firms. THEY get deals done, deals pitchd to them by large groups of snivelling ECM bankers and they make the front pages of the WSJ. When you hear of an investment banker who makes as much as Warren Buffet or George Soros, please get in touch. Maybe I'll thinking of learning some Excel then.

But noone wants to be a trader. Traders are seen as overweight (check), badly dressed (fuck you), foul-mouthed (fuck you) and unintelligent (i.e. not from Ivy Leagues). In short, we live in a world where noone wants to rule. It should be plain as a sub-urban girl where the true opportunities in finance lie.