Author Archives: pk

the elusive hope (2 of 10)

note: ten-part series continued! | 1

“It’s like a Buddhist resort here,” he said as his mother served him a bowl of bibim bap. It wasn’t the normal Koreatown fare. The rice was dark brown, of assorted grains, and the vegetables were fresh and plentiful, not to mention organic. His parents had stopped eating meat years ago as a health measure. He didn’t mind; it was a welcomed sight after weeks of greasy Chinese take-out and flabby turkey sandwiches from the corner deli.

“So have you heard from Janet lately?” his mother asked as she sat across from him at the dining table.

“Mom. I don’t know. I told you we stopped talking a couple of months ago. It’s over. She’s out of my life now,” he said. He kept his head down and ate from the bowl.

“I’m sorry. I just thought you guys would at least check up on each other. You were friendly even after it ended and -”

“Mom. Please. I didn’t come here for this.”

His mother got up from the chair and walked towards the kitchen counter. She leaned on her elbows and rested her head on her left palm. She looked and took in the image of her sullen son eating at the table – the once cute boy who had grown up to become this unkempt, awkward, and now lonely man. She let out a sigh and walked out of his sight.

****

He found his father intensely absorbing the pages of his latest passion, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus – Capitalism and Schizophrenia. He remembered learning about Deleuze from his college days. The French philosopher had become a chronically sick man by his late sixties, and at seventy years old, he jumped out of the hospital window and took his own life. You can theorize all you want, he thought, but we all die in the end. He wondered how his father never tired of the tedious reading.

“You should read this some day,” his father said, his eyes still fixed on the pages. “It explains a great deal about how capitalism alienates us by forcing us to care for ourselves as individuals but at the same time, it forces us to come together as social groups to function. It’s a mentally diseased system.”

He nodded and muttered some vague comments in agreement. There was a time when heated philosophical conversations with his father enlivened a Sunday afternoon with both of them reaching for the bookshelf to point out quotes and refute the counterparty’s arguments. Sometime in the past fifteen years, he had lost complete interest and stopped reading. He grew tired from his father’s ongoing summary and decided to take a walk outside.

Suburbia isn’t so bad, he thought. He liked the sight of basketball hoops in driveways and the lushness of well-manicured lawns. He had discussed the possibility of living in the suburbs with Janet on several occasions when they used to entertain the idea of kids. He crushed the cigarette butt and took out another one. A carton here would be cheaper, he remembered. He headed towards the local 7-Eleven.

call me an RR

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the first time i heard of Series 7 was when i watched Boiler Room a few years ago. i learned that it was some test that people took in order to become licensed brokers. when i accepted my offer to be an analyst at Lehman Brothers last November, i had no idea that i would be required to take the Series 7. my job (according to descriptions i had read about it) would have little to do with speaking directly with customers or making market transactions. but as part of Capital Markets, i was handed two three-inch binders at the beginning of training and told that this Series 7 test lurked in the near future.

the binders sat in my room untouched for about a month. i had not heard any instructions on studying the material beforehand, and i saw on our schedule that we would have a full week of training devoted to the test. “how hard could it be?” i thought. i remembered the guys in Boiler Room were middle class suburban white boys who went to crappy colleges, and if they could manage to pass this test, i knew i’d be in pretty good shape. except i forgot that Boiler Room is a movie.

panic seized me when i took my first practice exam exactly one week ago. i scored somewhere in the fifties and many of my correct answers came from wild guesses. i had read some of the sections while in the bathroom or on the subway, but some of questions were just too damn specific.

Accrued interest on new municipal bonds is calculated from the:
a. purchased date
b. Settlement date
c. dated date
d. last interest payment

each practice exam was 125 questions. the real test would be 250 questions. there were options, muni bonds, NASD rules, FX, underwriting, interest rates, mutual funds, annuities, REITs, and all other sorts of things under the umbrella of this very basic level of finance. and yet, the details seemed mountainous. some of my peers, most of them who had taken courses or had finance internships before, expressed some anxiety as well. at least i’m not alone, i thought.

statistically, 66% of those who take the test pass. the average score is 73% and you need 70% to pass. we were sternly told by HR that failure to pass the Series 7 in two attempts would lead to termination. yikes. perhaps nothing serious compared to the rumors that Citi and JP Morgan cut some of their i-bankers for crappy test scores during training, but the very possibility of losing my job so early was a bit intimidating. i hadn’t even sat in my cubicle yet!

i couldn’t stay awake in class. we sat in a windowless classroom somewhere near Battery Park every day last week from 9am-4pm. i came to love the Korean-owned deli downstairs and looked forward to the sausage, egg & cheese sandwich each morning. and although we had an excellent instructor who gave us very effective notes and tips, i could not keep myself from burying my head into the desk and passing out. it was as if i was getting rest so i could do serious studying later on (which, thankfully, i did) it also didn’t help that i lost feeling in my right hand on some of the mornings. you ever get that? when you can’t grip a pen for a few hours at a time or your hand starts to tremble? okay, maybe i need to get it checked out.

for the next six days, i found myself after work either at my desk in my room or at butler library taking practice exams and reading sections from the binder. there were moments when i thought about contingency plans – what kind of job i could apply for if this finance thing didn’t pan out, how i would go about making payment on rent, how i could show my face around to my friends and family. it was an uncertain time, and it certainly didn’t help that my scores could not break the magic 70. i tried to type up every single answer from the answer keys to help me memorize some things better. my roommate rich gave me a private lesson on options which helped me a great deal, and i tried to see if certain wall street journal articles made more sense after learning about a few things on a given day.

i broke 70 on saturday, two days before my test. i remember holding my answers in my hand and staring at the handwritten score on top. it was a great feeling, even if it was just a practice test. i treated myself to a shrimp salad at Le Monde while i went over the answers i got wrong. progress, hope, and encouragement – good things.
later that day, i took what is called the “Greenlight Exam.” our instructor told us that the results of the Greenlight Exam would, 94% of the time, reflect the score we would get on the real Series 7, “give or take 5%.” i scored 77% and pumped my fist like Tiger Woods when he wins majors.

on sunday i reviewed my notes and took another practice exam. i scored 66%, but convinced myself that the questions were a lot harder than the ones i had seen. no, the Greenlight was my winning ticket. i caught glimpses of In the Mood for Love on our beautiful big screen as Warren and Jackie watched in the living room. i felt relaxed and even a bit confident. i bounced pep talks in my head – yeah, pete, you worked hard, you’ll get it done, man. com’on, you went to an ivy league school, you can’t let yourself down now! every little thing sometimes helps.

this morning at One Penn Plaza, i saw my peers wearily walking into the building, all wearing looks of fatigue or anxiety. “man, i took the Greenlight this morning and got a 70,” said Gibbons, an analyst in Real Estate and frat bros with Warren at MIT. he looked very tired and talked about having crammed everything into a weekend. Brandon, a friend doing Public Finance, told me about taking six exams all of sunday and another one very early in the morning. the tests were given on computers and there were very strict security provisions. no phones, notepads, or anything was allowed inside the testing rooms. i had to throw out my Starbucks coffee, only a few sips old. i wore a button-down flannel because offices are usually air-conditioned and cold. they told me that if i thought about taking the flannel off during the test, i would have to come out of the room to do so. the office was impersonal and bland, like most other offices of the world. i took a deep breath. i took several deep breaths, and went inside.

you are given a mandatory 30-min break in between the two sections, each containing 130 questions – five of them “experimental.” after the first session, which i finished with more than an hour an a half left, i met up with Matt, a fellow Securtization banker, and walked the streets outside the office to collect our thoughts and to get a breather. we agreed that some of the questions were challenging while some were easier than we had ever seen on our practice exams. Matt complained about the many mutual fund questions he had seen. i told him that mine was loaded with options. the Series 7 drew randomly from a bank of questions, so everyone would be given a uniquely-generated test. we grabbed coffee, had a pastry, and went back inside.

i finished with two hours left in my second section. i went back and reviewed every single question again. i ended up changing a few here and there. as the number closed in on 130 the second time, my heart began to pound. one peer sitting a few seats away, Anand, had completed his test a few minutes before and let deep breaths of relief out as he left the room. he had obviously passed. i looked at my computer screen and wondered if i was ready to press the Exit button, which would go ahead and calculate my score. i felt like the time i was in elementary school and reading my essay in front of parents and teachers at some appreciation event. my principal had to come over and tell me to slow down and take a deep breath because i was so nervous and reading so quickly. damn, how impersonal and cold was this test, just needing a few seconds to spit back at me my fate?

84%. whew.

there is a small affair left. it’s called the Series 63, somethng about state legislation, but i won’t get into it now. it’s on Wednesday and i’ll be studying for it today and tomorrow. but yes, just to go along with the happy mood i currently find myself in, call me an RR, or if you prefer the longer version, a Registered Representative. haha.

it was trying and sometimes unbearable, but you can’t deny the uplifting effect of an adversity story with a happy ending. that is my life, where taking a test about making money qualifies as an adversity.

the elusive hope (1 of 1o)

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note: this a short story written in 10-part serial form.

A cigarette break. He recalls the days when his parents’ friends adored him. He was only seven or eight, but everyone loved the way he said “hello” and “thank you.” His parents didn’t have friends anymore. They were retired recluses living together in some obscure town a few hours north of the city. His mother hated other Koreans for reasons he could never quite understand. His father, he felt, was defeated from trying too hard.

A homeless woman walks by and asks for a cigarette. He gives her one but doesn’t even see her. He remembers how his parents’ friends once bought him toys and clothes. The Lego set that made him want to be an architect. The first shirt that wasn’t from Kmart.

Back to work. He hates it, the way he doesn’t really care about it. He hates how the khaki pants fit him and how his stomach hangs a bit over the belt. He used to touch the ground and not feel a thing. He sits in his cubicle and flips through a few documents on a clipboard. He looks around and nobody’s in sight. He discreetly catches glimpses of naked women on his computer. Fire me, he whispers.

He still keeps a photo of his ex-wife on his dresser, although he’s pretty sure she’s close to remarrying. He remembers how she used to make the bed every morning, lining up the pillows perfectly. He imitates the routine as an homage. It’s already been two years, but he swears he can still remember her voice. He feels a sudden urge to visit his parents. This weekend he’ll go.