Finance Careers

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Money. You love everything about it. Buying it. Brokering it. Selling it.

You like to slice it and dice it like it’s a batch of Julienne-cut fries, and you have no qualms about holding your hand out for more when you need it…or when one of your clients needs it.

You don’t give a damn about doing good for the world. You just want to be rolling in it, and you don’t mind putting in 25 hours a day if that’s what it takes to make that dream a reality. Snobbish jerks tell you that you should be doing something productive or constructive, like curing cancer or saving lives on the operating table…but screw them. Who are they to judge you? You’re not doing anything illegal. Immoral at times, perhaps, but…nothing jailable.

If this is you, you have found your home deep in the bowels of Manhattan, where everything money comes home to roost.

Of course, Wall Street isn’t Wall Street anymore…not in the traditional sense. With so much buying and selling happening online, and in other financial centers, the physical location of Wall Street, NYC isn’t the madhouse it once was, nor is it essential that you be there in person in order to become successful in high finance. But…it doesn’t hurt.

Okay, so…the process comes in several flavors. Start with the analyst program, like at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Billy Joe Bob’s Investment Bank and Furniture Shop—the Goldman Sachs of southeast Cleveland. You’ve heard of used car salesmen selling used cars. Realtors generally sell used homes. Well, investment bankers sell used companies.

The next flavor comes in managing money. That is, a client paid your firm a fee to babysit their money, hopefully by making it grow fat and happy through smart investments. You can earn your way to the Biggest Loser by buying public stocks, like Coca-Cola and IBM, investing in private, tiny companies, like being an original at Google or Facebook, or by being a hybrid investor using both debt and equity to live somewhere in the world of private equity, hedge funds, real estate, and/or the mining of natural commodities like oil, gas or…whatever that stuff is they put in lava lamps.

And if you only have half a brain, you can still make serious bank by being a stockbroker. In fact, having exactly half a brain is…sort of a job requirement. Being a seller of money is a gig that isn’t going away, and there is always a shmuck who will listen to the advice of a well-dressed, well-cropped 26-year-old fresh out of a snazzy business school.

All right, enough jibber-jabber. You’re wasting time, and time is money. And you know that greed isn’t a four-letter word. (It’s five, but who’s counting?)

So yeah…greed is good. Now get out there and start accumulating massive wealth. Your private island isn’t going to pay for itself.

Careers In This Field