Plaid Green Jackets But No Hookers
My time on the Philly version of Wall Street.
This is the first installment in a series chronicling my journey through Wall Street — Philly style.
I spent 23 years chasing the Wall Street dream. I worked my way up from being a clerk to becoming a Financial Advisor. I worked at various big-name firms like the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, Vanguard and a couple of smaller firms too. I started out working in the back offices upstairs of the Philly Stock Exchange as a Bearer Bonds Clerk. You know — the big sheets of paper that had little coupons you cut off and sent back to your broker to get your interest payments.
It was interesting work, but I had my sights set on something way bigger than that. I wanted to work on the trading floor with the big boys downstairs in the basement. I was told that they built the trading floor in the basement to keep people from jumping out of the windows if they lost a lot of money. I don’t know if that is really true, but at the time I believed it.
I was a very ambitious young lady. I grew up in a working-class household where none of us knew anything about money or the stock market, but I learned about it in college. I wanted to work down there in that basement so bad that I and another coworker spent almost every lunch…
