Black Fridays by Michael Sears Page B

gave me nothing but platitudes. Sanders had been “the star of his training class” and “every department wanted him.” As a trader, he was “very customer-friendly” and “kept the sales force happy.” A Boy Scout.
    Ben, the maître d’ at Le Bernardin, didn’t recognize me, or was too polite to let it show. That was fine with me. Anonymity suited me. Toland made a show of speaking French and requested a table “out of the traffic.”
    “May you live in interesting times,” he said, raising his glass of Sancerre.
    I grunted.
    Toland didn’t notice. He was busy playing with his wine, slurping and gargling like he’d learned to do in some expensive wine course he’d once taken.
    It wasn’t until we were done with the first courses—grilled bacalao salad for me and the marinated Kumamoto oysters for him—that I got any relevant information.
    “Most of Sanders’ business was done with only a handful of accounts—hedge funds and money managers. The salesmen generally let the clients speak directly to the traders on that kind of business. There’s not much value-added from the sales side.”
    He had already finished the bottle of Sancerre. I was still nursing my first glass. He gestured for another.
    Salespeople are the point men and women for the firm, and are responsible to their clients for the firm’s best efforts on their behalf. Traders are responsible for the firm’s interest. They set price and manage risk. Together they act as a counterbalance, like two kids on a seesaw. But Wall Street is a zero-sum game—there are always winners and losers—and the moments when the best interests of firm and client coincide are rare. Keeping the sales and trading functions separate allows human beings to concentrate on their own primary goals. Of course, everyone’s primary goal is to make as much money in as short a period of time as possible, so the system is far from perfect. Some kid is always jumping off the bottom end of the seesaw.
    “You don’t run into compliance problems that way? Who resolves trade discrepancies? Who’s responsible for suitability? All the ‘He said, he said’ issues.”
    “That is ultimately the salesman’s responsibility, of course, but these are all big boys. Sophisticated, savvy, institutional accounts.”
    “So the client and the trader do some business and then they report it to the salesperson?”
    “Essentially.”
    “What do they do when there’s a fuckup?”
    “As I said, these are all big boys. They resolve these issues themselves. Every once in a very long while, I am called in to settle a squabble.”
    Not too often, I thought, if you’re out to three-hour lunches on a regular basis.
    It sounded like a lot of trust and responsibility to be laid on a fairly junior trader. It also sounded like a breeding ground for shortcuts.
    The main courses arrived and, for the next few minutes, my prison-starved senses were overwhelmed by the pan-roasted monkfish in red-wine brandy sauce. Toland was swilling his way through the second bottle of wine.
    “If you like, we could set up a call with some of those clients. They might give you some insight on the kind of trading he was doing.”
    I gave a polite cough. “Sorry, that won’t work. Direct contact with clients could get me in some serious trouble. I’ll have to get what I can from your salespeople.”
    Toland seemed embarrassed at the gaffe—Stockman must have filled him in on my situation. He took another long swallow.
    I kept eating.
    “Yes, well,” he finally mumbled. “I’ll set that up for you first thing in the morning.”
    “No chance of getting started today?”
    “Afraid not. I have a client meeting here uptown after lunch. You take the car. The driver will get you back to the office.”
    I thought he was going to have a tough time with a client meeting. The second bottle was down below the label. His face was flushed and his eyes a bit watery. In his condition, I would have been headed home to