In the famous book of Michael Lewis One of many great details about the financial crisis, The
Big Short, and observations on the former FrontPoint head trader Danny Moses is passage.
In Steve Eisman’s team Moses, described as the small-picture guy, claimed that he could tell a
lot about a guy just by looking at him.
The best place for Wall Street people to study was on the morning commute from Connecticut.
Moses estimated about it that 95% of the people on his morning Metro-North train worked on
Wall Street.
Just by looking at them, he said that he could tell at a glance what their jobs were and where
they worked of these people.
If the people were on their BlackBerrys, they were probably hedge
fund guys and they were checking their profits and losses in the
Asian markets.
If the people slept on the train they were probably sell-side people —
brokers, who had no skin in this game
Anyone person who carried a briefcase or a bag was probably not
employed on the sell side, as the only reason you’d carry a bag was to
haul around brokerage research, and the brokers didn’t read their
reports — at least not read in their spare time.
Hedge fund guys were worked uptown and so exited Grand Central to
the north and where taxis appeared haphazardly and out of nowhere
to meet them, like farm trout rising to corn kernels.