Free Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story by Greg Smith Page A

receives a hundred of them in a morning, what are the odds he’s going to listen to yours? And in any case, once I started getting to know my clients well, my relationship with them became good enough that they would pick up my call when they saw my number on their Caller ID.
    The wagering action on how we first-years would do on the Series 7 definitely ratcheted down a few notches after September 11. Nobody on the trading floor was in an especially feisty mood. Nor was I. Having gotten a glimpse of how hard the test was, I buckled down even more in my studying, to the point where I was scoring 82 and 83 on the practice exams. But it was very difficult finding the motivation to study during this period.
    A month after the attacks, the Series 7 test takers went back to One Penn Plaza. Same elevator. Same seventeenth-floor waiting room. Same staff monitoring the test. Same floor-to-ceiling window I’d looked through to see the North Tower on fire. It was a surreal experience. But I was far more prepared for the exam than I’d been the previous time. In a way, I thought then and still think now, it didn’t seem very compassionate of Goldman to make us take the test again just a month later. But realistically, there was nothing to be done about it. Our passing it was a practical necessity.
    And when I hit the key for my results after I’d clicked on my final answer, there was good news: I’d scored an 86. I was ready to be a sales trader.
    Now all I needed were clients.
    Gradually, as Rudy developed more faith in me, he started to give me a few of my own. On Wall Street they call them “practice clients”—there isn’t much upside for the firm in any interaction with them, but there’s not much downside, either. The ideal scenario is when there are junior people on both sides of the call, both trying to learn their way.
    In the meantime, my Slovak counterpart seemed to be trying to raise her game. Whenever the phones rang—it was typically the first-year analyst’s job to answer phones—she would always try to hit the line first. If I left ten voice mails for clients, she’d leave twelve. It all felt very strange to me: we were both on the same track, and again, I was not a threat to her in any respect.
    Or maybe I was.
    The previous summer, the firm had taken a Turkish telecommunications company public, and Rudy had needed someone to shepherd the CEO on a visit to some of the big hedge funds and mutual funds that were our clients. He looked me up and down and said, “Springbok, you’re going to do this trip.” Nicknames were important at Goldman Sachs, and the Beast had honored me with a good one: the springbok is the swift gazelle that’s a kind of national mascot in South Africa, the symbol for the country’s rugby team.
    So there I was, just out of college, and there was this head of a billion-dollar corporation, and it was just the two of us, traveling in California and Texas, with me carrying his bag. He was a slick guy, with slicked-back hair, and you could tell that in his native Turkey he was a big shot. He could have kicked up a fuss about having some junior analyst assigned to him. But I think he felt a bit intimidated by being in America. For one thing, he barely spoke any English. (I spoke even less Turkish.) He had never been to San Francisco or San Diego or San Antonio, the three cities on our itinerary. Oddly enough for someone who’d been in the United States for only four years, I knew a lot more about what was going on than he did.
    At first I wasn’t sure how much I should speak in the client meetings. Should I keep quiet? Should I kick off each meeting with a few words about the Turkish company? But I soon discovered that the Turkish CEO was grateful for all the help I could give him. And I was learning more every day.
    That trip brought a small triumph of another kind: after a day of meetings in San Francisco, I got to return to Stanford and see old friends—not just as an alum but as a