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 what working at an investment bank, where the promised land is always one more twenty-hour workday and another lap dance away.

Fresh out of Wharton and Harvard business schools, John Rolfe and Peter Troob ran willingly into the open arms of investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & 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 escaping 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.

Chapter 1

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 a given 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.

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Copyright © 2000 by John Rolfe and Peter Troob

Tags: Investing

About the Author

John Rolfe grew up in Virginia, the heart of Dixie. He survived on a daily diet of collard greens and ham hocks. He attended the first in a long line of parent-teacher conferences for disciplinary problems as a kindergartner after hocking a loogie onto another student in his gym class. John's parents deny all responsibility for his early, ornery demeanor. More

Peter Troob grew up on the rough and tumble streets of Scarsdale New York. While in grade school he starred in James and the Giant Peach and then went on to be Sonny in the Scarsdale High School senior play, Grease. Only 5'8", Peter mistakenly fancied himself a career in the NBA until, during his senior year in high school, he tore his anterior cruciate ligament and decided to take up golf instead.