Pretty Much Everyone On Wall Street Hates Technology

Employment by Occupation

Data series	Employment,  2011
Brokerage clerks	47,970
Financial analysts	53,350
Financial managers	26,310
Personal financial advisors	96,490
Securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents	173,140

(Source: Occupational Employment Statistics)

I'm certain that of the 400,000 people above who are/were employed by the securities industry in this country (there are 800,000 in total), only a few dozen have any love for technology and innovation.  Why is that?  It's easy to just say that they're so content making their awesome wages that they intentionally keep their heads in the sand in hopes that this whole facebook thing is just a passing fad and they're true value-add to the system will one day again soon become evident and they will return to their pre-bank failure income.  Maybe that strategy will work, sure.


Or, maybe it's because these same people are like pretty much everyone else who works in industry and hates when the unfamiliar and shady indian and russian people they don't know at their company roll out new software intentionally designed to make their lives miserable and muck up the way they do their business.  It threatens their livelihood, because upgrades (or "downgrades", as they're affectionally called on wall street), almost always have early and costly DFU errors and even worse, glitches which are completely unacceptable to those of us who are superhumans tirelessly pounding our keyboards and phones to keep the American dream going due to our having-enough-balls-to-have-gotten-into-this-seat-itis.  Again, maybe that is why wall street hates tech, I mean careers have been built (including mine to some degree) on a quick-mindedness and ease on seemingly "video game" software that was built in the 90s paired with a bit of gumption and an other worldly lack of anxiety around executing tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in single trading sessions.  Learning new software is scary, and it takes attention away from valueable time making money for shareholders, or clients, or whatever.  We were so selfless!  It was this kind of mindset that provoked comments from senior guys on the sales desk who made three sticks a year to inform me early in my career that when I messed up an order slightly (because we were expected to be perfect in the face of massive market manipulation, huge multi point swings up and down, and multi billion dollar hedge funds deploying rocket scientist designed algorithms created to figure out when I had a buy or sell order, and also good old insider information) was taking money out of their kid's mouths. 

Or it could be that these 400k people have compliance officers who don't allow them to play around with the internet during the day by blocking most sites and depriving them of learning the great innovations out there.  And the 400k is probably a bit older now, twitter is for 13 year olds and Ashton Kutcher.  And we are so dead from dealing with nut jobs and incompetents all day and clients and dinners that technology is something we're really never going to learn about.  We didn't have time to be reading blogs during the day.  We used Bloomberg and read so much research that our tired minds are full.  What I'm trying to say is social media has had no place in Wall Street.

For about five years, there was maybe one blog you'd see on screens around the trading desks.  It was done by a dude who worked at Citi (they knew) and had the occassional butt shot of a bikini model and funny stories about working on wall street and being obese and the shenanegans of going out every night and getting wasted with clients, putting pubes on a manager's keyboard, and other great empire building exercises. 

You probably know one of these 400K souls. You've probably asked them for some stock advice, or more likely, you've shyly admitted to them that you have no idea what to do with your money.  How did that work out? Thirteen years ago you probably expected and actually got a real answer that was a sure thing and you definitely didn't lose. 

It's ok, because no one has any idea, right?  Things are crazy now.  Even worse, those of us who live in NY/NJ/CT have some hubris ridden cockiness that since we rub shoulders with some of these 400k brave soldiers and our country's financial centre that we're better off and more informed than the rest of the poor souls in this country.  We don't do the work necessary to make informed decisions.  And the 400k would rather we not.  They don't want us talking to each other.  They want to keep their jobs.