They Don’t Pay Traders Like They Used To
Also Libra and taxes, HSBC and Huawei, lost Bitcoins and space gold.
Different times, man:
That’s from a Bloomberg profile of Ashok Varadhan, one of three co-heads of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s securities division, and the only one who comes from trading—“the last link to another era at Goldman Sachs, to the time when the traders ruled.” A time when 25-year-old associates joined on $1 million guarantees! Disclosure, I also joined Goldman as a lateral associate, and I did not interview with the CEO. I also did not get $1 million a year. Nor did I make partner four years after I joined, as Varadhan did. (Actually I quit four years after I joined.) Now, I interviewed nine years after Varadhan, and I was not especially the right man for the job. But the main difference is probably that he was a very productive trader and I was neither particularly productive nor a trader at all. “In his first six months as an associate, the brash young trader with a penchant for big bets”—him, not me—“raked in more than $300 million in gains.”