City workers salaries

OddjobKIA

studentphil wrote:

It makes sense, I would buy myself

Yeah with 15 years of hindsight anybody would buy

But at the time they were looking at terminal meltdown and The USA goverment were not handing out rescue packages like conffeti at a wedding at that time. particulary to compaines that could hold the country to financiall ransome

studentphil

OddjobKIA wrote:

Yeah with 15 years of hindsight anybody would buy

But at the time they were looking at terminal meltdown and The USA goverment were not handing out rescue packages like conffeti at a wedding at that time. particulary to compaines that could hold the country to financiall ransome

Yes, well I would never make it as trader, so nevermind:rotfl:

thor

OddjobKIA wrote:

If you stack shelves in tesco you kn ow where your going to put the frosties and when youve done that you know you've done it right!

Where to put your clients £1,000,000 is a risk based on assumption, guess work, and knowledge of the market, whats more you have to know when to take the investnment back out again for your clients maximum return. To early and you could miss out on another 2.5% profit, to late and bye bye £1,000,000.

What a load of nallacks!!! I agree totally with phil. The only reason that city workers are making money is that the markets are nearly always rising. Look at the periods when this was not the case such as the great depression. Yeah sure there may have been some who still did well out of it but the vast majority would have lost a fortune and none of their so called 'hard work' would have made a difference. It is just like the way that house renovaters buy up houses to do them up and flog them off for a profit even when they make a pigs ear out of it. The property market is moving upwards and it would take a right disaster to not profit from it.
You might say that city workers pick & choose the right shares so that their portfolios outperform the market but every year you see the results of experiments where they are pitted against little kids and chimps and still fail to beat them.

HappySad

It is really funny reading StudentPhil and everyone explaing to him about thing and why the city workers are able to get 1,000s and milliions in bonuses.

StudentPhil you are very much showing lack of experience in things. Even if you don't really understand why they are being paid so much and you can see that their job is not more difficult/demanding than others (nursers, teachers etc). Logic would let you know that if we would all easily do their jobs and get all that money then we all would and if we all could then the pay would go down because everyone can do that job.

Companies only pay staff for what they generate for the company and also for the scarcity of that skill. So if you are making billions for the company and there are only a few that can do that for you then you pay them millions (a fraction of what they are making for you) in pay & bonuses. IT 10 years ago would pay very high wages because there was a much lack in IT trained/experience people on the market. You could get very well paid jobs just because you had 1 years experience. Not things are very different. No everyone is trained and doing IT/Web stuff ect and the wages have gone down by loads.

Believe me if we all could do their job for just 1 year earn 1 million pound then do what we really love to do then we would but with a bit of thinking you can see that this is not so. These people have a special skill in their knowledge, confience, experience & stamina that allow them to work this job & meet all of its demands. Saying that others work just as hard is completely irrelivant as they are working hard at a job that does not provide as much wealth for a company and is only provided by a few of these wealth creators.

I am sure StudentPhil that when/if you have more experience in working/business you would be able to understand what the others are saying.

Who would you pay more.
Person 1. Works 12 hours and generates £1,000K for you or ...
Person 2 who works 14 hours and generates £50K for you...

Also consider that there are only 10 person1's inthe country. You would have to pay person 1 a high wage to keep him with you because your competors would have him in their books.

Gabriel-Ernest

studentphil wrote:

I am sure many people if they spent their prrofessional life studying companies and markets then they could do it.

I am sure when people get these jobs that they are no expert on much of it.

Phil - it takes a really unique person to make it in the City at the top levels. Very very few can do it - for the kind of jobs you have in mind, you need:

- These days a top degree before they'll even look at you, and in many cases experience too; gone are the days when barrow boys from the East End stunned the City with their natural abilities.

- The ability to make snap decisions on pricing and a phenomenal mathematical ability to interpret figures. I knew someone who went for interview with a top American bank and it was the toughest thing he ever did; he was given an imaginary scenario by the interviewer, had to make a series of 4 instant decisions within 10 seconds based on verbal descriptive price moves regarding FX trades across different currencies, and was shown out with the comment 'You just lost an imaginary $500 billion; Goodbye.' He was in the room less than 2 minutes.

- Balls of brass to cope with the competition; there's always someone below after your job. Don't expect any loyalty from your employer - unless you're very fortunate, it's a case of who can screw whom the fastest for the most amount of money. Jobs in the financial sector are very insecure; last year was a good year and a lot of financial companies have announced they are looking to expand this year, but if there's a downturn in the economy, they'll be the first ones out of a job. People were laid off in swathes in the mid/late-Nineties and we're due for another downturn in the financial sector within the next few years.

- Expect to work 18-20 hour days for a few years, getting up in the middle of the night to read faxes and check prices, and have no life whatsoever, no leisure to spend all that money. A significant minority spend their lives on coke just trying to stay awake.

- A certain American financial company I know keeps permanent suites at a swanky health spa because so many of their staff burn out. The human body is not designed to operate for any length of time in such an artificial environment; the adrenaline would kill them.

- It can all go pearshaped in an instant. Remember Nick Leeson? Motivated by greed, bumptious little oik (I knew people who knew him; the financial sector is incestuous to say the least), yes, but it allegedly started when one of his juniors made the wrong hand signal when trading on SIMEX, and he tried to cover it up in a dummy account, and it was downhill from there. The Barings fiasco changed the industry for ever; now you'll have your compliance department, internal auditors, external auditors, your financial regulator, domestic and overseas sanctions bodies, and any stock exchanges where you have memberships breathing down your neck and scrutinising everything you do. We've just come through a round of justifying our decisions and practices to the auditors, one after the other; nothing scandalous there because we operate to the highest global standards, but someone somewhere up the food chain would pay if anything really dodgy was uncovered, possibly with a prison sentence. That's another reason why the big boys earn mega-bucks; they're laying their futures on the line like sacrificial lambs ready to carry the can.

- Most of the top fliers I've known see it as a step; they work themselves into the ground for a few short years before leaving in their early thirties to do something they really want to do like teaching. A friend of mine in his thirties is giving up bond trading to move to France and renovate a derelict farmhouse he's bought. In my company we have a tiny few left who joined after leaving school 30-40 years ago when the financial world was very different; no-one joining now will still be working in the industry at 35-40, and we're not even one of the high-pressured rat-laboratories.

- But for the right person the financial rewards are just unbelievable; we heard today that 4 partners at a particular hedge fund firm earned £58.6m each last year. Even so, I wouldn't swap my life for theirs. It's a question of priorities. I don't have that killer instinct, that drive, that obssession, which is why my pay packet is minimal compared to theirs, and I'm happy for it to be that way.

- If you want to read a fictionalised account of what life can be like, read Tarnished Copper by Geoff Sambrook who used to work at my old company and who allegedly based some of his details on people I worked with on our LME desk (boy were the jungle drums going when his book was released):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tarnished-Copper-Corruption-Financial-Markets/dp/1904433022

*Louise*

studentphil wrote:

What do people make of them getting tens of thousands in bonuses?

I'm just gutted it's not me......

IvanOpinion

studentphil wrote:

I am sure even I could sit there and press about on my Spreadsheets and I am nothing special.

an we take a vote on this. I am not sure if we should consider it one question or if we should split it into two
1. Could Phil press about on his spreadsheets
2. Is Phil nothing special
I am open to suggestions

Ivan

Gabriel-Ernest

Ivan - are you an independent poster or are you the voice in Phil's head?

Saucepot

It's a market economy. Demand and supply. However laudable the endevours of nurses or charity workers pretty much anyone is capable of doing it.

Those careers which everyone isn't capable of doing, are always going to pay more.

Get used to it or get used to queuing for bread in a command economy.

Tom_Jones

Phil your an IDIOT, there's no way you would ever have the intelligence level to work in the City, no doubt when you finish being a student, mananger of the local Maccy d's will be your level.