We’ve been coming to this stupid conference room for most of the week, and it feels like every day is the same. We arrive at 7am—we’re supposed to sign our names off at the door, but no-one ever does. From 7.30am onward, a succession of bored employees from different parts of Walters Capital come and lecture us about the importance of their area. Every one of them seems convinced that their area is the most important and crucial one in the firm, and not one of them seems to want to be here, talking to us.

On the first day, everyone was quiet and cowed by the grandeur of the firm and all that, but as it gradually became apparent that the speakers were mostly unwilling and the information mostly useless, the atmosphere gradually deteriorated. Now, the room resembles a high school class on the last day of the semester. At the back, there are a group of guys who are just plain fast asleep; heads back, ties loosened. Maybe they were out late, maybe they just really like sleeping. Hard to say. Down in front are the really eager trainees; heads down, scribbling notes as if there’s going to be an exam next week.

Uh-oh. I hope there isn’t going to be an exam next week.

The guys at the back have made arrangements to get an offer from one of the teams no matter what they do—because they’re the son of a major client, or the younger brother of someone in the firm or something like that, or they’ve decided they don’t give a damn about being cut. Either way, they’ve got nothing to lose. When they wake up, they entertain themselves by throwing scrunched-up balls of paper at the front row. The front row try to ignore it, presumably while nursing revenge fantasies of the time when they are rich and powerful financial wizards in their own right, and can inflict similar injustices on others.

Adam and Errol are in the front row. For myself, I usually slink in and try to get a seat somewhere near the middle. I’ve ditched the three-inch Louboutins and gone for something more sensible, a two-inch court shoe, but even in those I’m tall enough and skinny enough to stick out a bit. I’m also one of the only girls, but that’s not so new.

* * *

This afternoon’s speaker is a short man with a tie so wide it almost covers his entire belly. An immense bristling mustache nearly obscures his mouth, from which comes a steady stream of profanities. If his talk had a title—no-one tells us what they’re going to talk about—it would be something like ‘The Law of The Jungle: Why Trainees Are The Lowest Form of Life on Earth’. Right now he is explaining about the competitive nature of our business.

“This is a f***ing cutthroat game. I’m telling you little pukes right now, it’s f***ing brutal out there, and you miserable little motherf***ers had better listen carefully or you’re going to get your g*ddamned f***ing faces ripped off.” He continues in this vein for some minutes. It’s fun learning how many curse-words one person can fit into a single sentence, and then guessing whether they’re going to be able to break their own record, but we’re really not learning much about international finance from it. I try to look as interested and attentive as I can while speculating about the number of people who get their faces metaphorically ripped off every day at Walters Capital. Maybe they should invest in a plastic surgery clinic.

Pausing for a break between oaths, the short man scans the room, mustache twitching. “You.” He points to Adam in the front row. “What’s the overnight LIBOR rate from this morning?”

Luckily for Adam, this is the kind of question he can answer. “It’s, uh, zero point nine seven seven percent. That’s for one month. The, uh, twelve-month rate is—” The short man cuts him off.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s enough, Brainiac.” There is a hoot of derision from the back, and I swing around. A couple of guys who look like they would be more at home in a scrimmage line than in suits and ties are pulling faces, and one of them has a paper ball in his hand. I glare at him. He moves to aim it at me, and I raise my eyebrows. Come on, try me. Down in front, the short man continues.

“Our friend here demonstrates one g*ddamned thing you little pukes need to know. Information. This f***ing business runs on f***ing information. If you don’t have the information you need out in the market,” he pauses for breath.

Don’t tell me, let me guess; I’m going to get my face ripped off, right?

“You’re gonna get your f***ing face ripped off.” Woohoo. And I thought we weren’t learning anything. The guy in the back row is still holding the paper ball and he’s still deliberating whether to throw it at me. I narrow my eyebrows; they’re pretty narrow to start with, and I’ve been practicing the don’t-mess-with-me look since I started coming here. I see his face twitch, and he’s on the verge of cracking, when the conference room door opens with a whoosh.

It’s Hot Salesman from the lobby on Monday, all fitted suit and polished shoes. He walks across to the short man, and they have a brief conversation. We can’t hear what they’re saying, but evidently it concerns the audience. Finally, the short man nods, pulls on his tie one final time, and heads for the door. The salesman turns to us. Everyone looks at him.

“Right, can I have everyone’s attention, please? I won’t take up much of your time, and after this you can all go to lunch early.” He starts to walk as he talks, long paces taking him the length of the room and quickly back. I try to concentrate on what he’s saying, and not on the way his shoulder muscles stand out under his jacket. I don’t really succeed very well.

“As you heard from the last speaker, information is the core of our business. Not just getting it, but processing it, quantifying it, and applying it. Problem is, people tend to think about the first part, and not about the others.” He pauses to pick up a piece of paper from the lectern. “Investment decisions, whether they are long- or short-term, are made on the basis of predictive mathematical models. These models are often held up as being works of genius—all that financial-wizard stuff—but the truth is they’re fallible. They can only tell us what the humans who built them allow them to tell us.” He crumples the paper into a ball.

“So, we’re in a constant battle with our own expectations and our own prejudices about what should happen. You’ve all read about the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the collapse of banks here and overseas. Those episodes show us that when we don’t constantly question our own thinking, things go wrong, fast.” The guys up the back have stopped listening by this point and I can hear them shuffling their feet and snickering.

“What I’m trying to tell you is that if you want to work in this job, and if you want to win this game, you have to stay alert.” He stops, and in one smooth movement winds up and throws the paper ball. It sails in a long arc, over the trainees, and it smacks one of the guys in the back row right in the side of the head, with an audible ‘thwack’.

Horrified, the class looks at him. “Alert at all times.” I try very hard not to smile at this point, and almost succeed. The salesman starts his walk again. “So, here’s the problem. If you were the other investment firms in our market—our rivals—and you wanted to get an edge on us, what would you do? Give me some ideas.”

Gradually, hands start to go up.

“Hire staff away.”

“Invest in lobbyists.”

“Steal our clients.”

He smiles. “Good answers, but there’s something you’re missing.” Silence. “Come on, you’re supposed to be the best and brightest, remember?”

I think for a minute. All those things are in secret. What about things that are out in the open? I put my hand up, and Hot Salesman fixes me with his green eyes. Wow, having him look at you is remarkably distracting. And that body underneath the suit. Damn.

“Haas, isn’t it? What have you got to offer me, Ms. Haas?”

“Well,” I start, “I’d watch what we were doing in the market. I’d watch all of our trades, and all of our investment activity. That stuff is all public once it’s happened, so we can’t conceal it.”

Hot Salesman smiles and nods. “Good. Go on.”

“In particular, I’d look for the times we would be expected to do something, and we don’t. So, if there’s something everyone else is doing to make money, and we don’t do it? That suggests we know something other people don’t.”

He snaps his fingers and points at me. “Exactly. Being the most successful firm means that everybody is watching you, all the time. When we do something that’s unexpected, everyone watches. This can be a blessing, and it can be a curse. It’s a blessing because of the amount of attention it gets us, and the clients it brings to our door. It’s a curse, because it means we can only do something clever once.”

At this point, everyone is watching, enthralled. He picks up a marker pen and begins to sketch on the whiteboard, circles and equations covering it rapidly. “Remember that euro investment that was in the news on Monday? Computationally speaking, it was pretty straightforward; a linear differential equation model which looks for unusual associations between the prices of particular instruments. Because it was computationally simple, we could do many simulations with it in near real-time, a permutation analysis designed to identify associations that were a consequence of actual price movements, and separate them from things that were just noise.” The marker squeaks along the whiteboard, and I blink. This guy knows a lot for a salesman. Usually the pretty ones are the dumb ones. That, in a nutshell, is kind of why I’m single.

“But there’s a problem. The predictions it makes are completely characteristic; they give themselves away, and the strategy away, as soon as they’re done. So it worked once, and it worked great. But then,” a sweeping movement puts a diagonal line across everything on the board, “it’s useless from now on. Everyone will have seen it in action, and they will have changed their own strategy to watch for it. If we tried it again, we’d lose money hand over fist. Like magicians doing a trick, the more times you repeat it, the more people can tell how the trick is done. So we have to keep coming up with new tricks, and we can’t ever stop.”

He walks toward us, palms outstretched. “So that’s where you come in. If you want to help us stay winners, you need to be a source of fresh ideas. Make sense?”

There’s a murmur of assent. “Right, that’s all. You can go to lunch now.”

The group makes their way toward the door, jostling and arguing about where to go for lunch. Putting my pen in my bag, I look up, and see Hot Salesman looking at me again.

“That was a good answer, Ms. Haas. You would have been an asset when we were pulling off that trade on Monday.”

My curiosity gets the better of me at this point. “How come you know so much about how the model works? That permutation analysis stuff is pretty complicated.”

He smiles broadly. “Because I created it.” My look of shock is obvious, and his enjoyment is equally obvious. “It wasn’t that complicated, really.”

Now I feel like Adam does when he gets questioned about his suit. “You—you’re—”

“Tom Macaulay. At your service, Ronnie Haas.”

Oh shit. Hot Salesman may be hot, but he’s not a salesman.

Actually, he’s the head of the quantitative division of the company. Tom Macaulay, the financial wizard.

And now he thinks that I think he’s an idiot.