A gang of buy side traders cruises up Park Avenue in their 1963 black Chevy Impala convertible with high performance exhaust system, 20-inch rims and leather upholstery. White dudes, average age 32, and all make around $900k a year. Instead of glocks, they have their buy and sell tickets locked and loaded.

They need capital. They roll up on Credit Suisse: pow pow, pow… All that’s left are chalk outlines. Then they make their way up to Midtown to light up Morgan Stanley with a sawed-off: ba-boom. After the closing bell they creep over to Barclays’ front porch to put down a couple of 40s of O.E. and marinate. Later, they make a move downtown to meet a tier IV broker – the mad hatter. They’re looking to pick up some rock. After they cop the package they come across a couple of suckas from Cantor Fitz. “Yo,” the buy side boys sing out, “You wanna open an account or what?” The brokers are overjoyed. That’s when the bangers take out a 9 millimeter and carjack the brokers’ expensed town cars. “Peace out – Girl Scout.”

Maybe it was just me, but in my later years working the buy side I noticed a bizarre subculture developing on the street: gangsta-trading. It’s as if we took everything we learned from Biggie, N.W.A. and Tupac and applied it to the trading world. I mean, we were working on the street, so I guess it
makes sense. Here’s a deleted excerpt from a chapter in The Buy Side:

My life is now a few gold chains short of a hip-hop video. Nights are a blur of bottle service, clubs, and women. Meanwhile, days are filled with
trading and our performance is great. The market keeps going up. The weekends feature private jets, helicopters and exotic locations. By the middle of 2003 we’re on pace to pay the street close to 40 million dollars in commissions. That’s a big number by any standard, but the fact that we only trade healthcare puts us in the spotlight.

I’m sure you can imagine where the chapter goes from there…blah blah blah made a million dollars blah blah blah got an eight-ball of cocaine blah blah blah flew on a private jet to some tropical island. The chapter just didn’t cut it, so I cut it. I laugh at myself now, but back then I believed money and power made me a baller.  I even had a nom de rap – Cleveland D.  Oh yeah, I was a banger. I even helped write — and performed on – that Galleon song “Put Your Money on Galleon,” which dropped in the spring of 2000.

The thing is, whether you’re a gangbanger on the street or a buy side trader busting caps in people, your life span isn’t very long. Sometimes it pays to be ruthless, but everyone pimping a buy side ride knows that the sell side is waiting in an alley, watching for a mistake to be made. And when a buy sider turns his back he’ll hear a click-click sound. I’m sure hedge fund guys will always be peacocking and Jim Crammer will never lose his borrowed trademark “booyah,” but as Ice Cube once said, “Today I didn’t even have to use my A.K. – I gotta say it was a good day.”

A couple of years after I left the business I rolled into Random House and called out to the editors there, “Yo, I wanna do a book deal, fools. And I already know the cover. A photo of Wall Street (the actual street) with telephone wires running across the top. And hanging from those wires, you want
to put some Prada shoes tied at the laces. Ya’ feeling me?”

Those guys just didn’t get it. WORD!

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