Chapter One
"Twenty-Two-Five and All the Hanover Deli Food You Can Eat"
"He's busy," the Cramer & Company secretary said to me when I tried to contact Jim. "Call back after the close."
"Call back after you're closed?" I asked, confused.
"After the close."
"The close? The close of what?"
"The market!" she screamed and hung up.
After a little research and a few more hours, I tried again. At 4:15, the secretary told me to "try again tomorrow." The next day was the same thing all over again. A week later, I finally got through.
"I can waste a few minutes now," were Jim's first words to me.
I had memorized a long speech, complete with my 110 percent commitment to Cramer & Company, about why Jim should hire me. Before I could even op
Chapter One
"Twenty-Two-Five and All the Hanover Deli Food You Can Eat"
"He's busy," the Cramer & Company secretary said to me when I tried to contact Jim. "Call back after the close."
"Call back after you're closed?" I asked, confused.
"After the close."
"The close? The close of what?"
"The market!" she screamed and hung up.
After a little research and a few more hours, I tried again. At 4:15, the secretary told me to "try again tomorrow." The next day was the same thing all over again. A week later, I finally got through.
"I can waste a few minutes now," were Jim's first words to me.
I had memorized a long speech, complete with my 110 percent commitment to Cramer & Company, about why Jim should hire me. Before I could even open my mouth, Jim told me not to bother. There was no room for me. This discussion was taking place only as a favor to Marty. Someone without market experience would be a "hindrance" to his operation, he said.
After this ten-second exchange, I hung up the phone and realized that what sounded too good to be true had been just that. I felt more desperate than before my meeting with Marty. Once I had mentally put myself in New York City, working for Jim Cramer's hedge fund, my previous career ideas seemed impossibly unexciting. Granted, I still didn't know who Jim Cramer really was, or what exactly a hedge fund did, but I had made up my mind that it was all pretty good. I went back to Marty, and the "misunderstanding," as he put it, was quickly worked out; a meeting with Jim arranged.
My interview at Cramer & Company in January 1994 was the first time I had ever gone to New York City on my own. I arrived at Penn Station on an Amtrak train, stuck my wallet in my sock, and prepared to die. All I knew of the city were the things I read every day in the New York Times metro section. The day before I arrived, a baby had been tossed out with the garbage, someone had been pushed in front of a subway train, and a taxi driver had purposely run over a bunch of pedestrians. The thing about New York is that at first you're scared you might get murdered, but after staying a few days you're more worried about killing someone else.
A light snow fell from the dark sky as I approached the front of 56 Beaver Street. On the ground floor of the eight-story brownstone was a closed restaurant, Delmonico's, which must have been quite a scene at one time, judging from the elegant mahogany tables and crystal chandeliers that collected dust inside the windows. The building sat at the juncture of five small streets in the heart of Wall Street, and was fitted like a slice of pie into the angle formed by Beaver and Stone Streets, with the front door of the restaurant facing the intersection. Skyscrapers loomed above, permanently shading the corner. Wearing a cheap gray suit my father had bought me the day before, I pressed the Cramer & Company buzzer. It was 6:30 A.M.
Jim Cramer met me at the front door of his seventh-floor office, shook my hand, and sized me up with beady brown eyes. Kinky dark hair jutted out in hectic spikes around the sides of his balding skull. About five foot nine and husky, maybe two hundred pounds, he stood sweating and breathing heavily, his jaw clenched. I wondered if he'd been running around in the office before I rang.
"I get in every morning very early," Jim announced.
He turned and quickly led me down a narrow hallway laid with worn green carpeting, past cheaply framed New Republic covers emblazoned with his name.
"I was just on a conference call talking with Lou Gerstner, the CEO of IBM," he said, sticking a finger under his collar and trying to loosen his tie. Although barely conscious at the time, I realized Jim had probably done more that morning than I would do all week.
We entered headquarters for his operation: a small, triangular room almost completely filled by a long, U-shaped gray Formica desk. The desk consisted of six connected workspaces, each piled with three or four monitors, and lots of oversized phone turrets that all had two receivers and more than fifty lights. Wires ran everywhere.
"This is the trading room" Jim said. He directed me to an empty seat while taking his own at the head of the desk. His chair was at the vertex of the room, directly above the restaurant's front door. Behind him was one of two filthy windows in the room that couldn't be opened or, apparently, washed. The walls looked like they hadn't been painted in years. Here and there magazine articles were posted up with thumbtacks. Upon closer inspection, I saw they were all about Jim.
"I sit here from the moment I get in until I leave at night," Jim explained, fiddling with a computer mouse to remove the screen saver on his center monitor -- a picture of himself smiling that resembled a publicity shot. Preoccupied with paperwork, newspapers, and the market data in front of him, he only occasionally glanced in my direction.
"I'm on the trading desk all day."
"Updating your systems?" I asked, noticing unopened boxes of new computer parts piled up against a wall behind Jim's chair.
"What?" He turned a page of the Financial Times.
"New monitors..." I pointed.
"Oh, those..."
"Jim, this is obviously an awkward situation for both of us." Feeling uncomfortable and more like an imposition than anything else, I decided I had nothing to lose by being candid. "I understand you don't want to give me a job just because Marty wants you to, and, truthfully, neither..."
Continues...
Excerpted from Trading with the Enemy by Maier, Nicholas W. Copyright © 2004 by Nicholas Maier. Excerpted by permission.
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