The story at Morgan Stanley goes like this: Gary Cohn, then president of arch-rival Goldman Sachs, boasted he wanted to crush Morgan Stanley like a cockroach.
When Ted Pick heard that, he erupted. In one of his signature blue-streaked tirades, he ordered troops on his Morgan Stanley trading floor to stick it to Goldman.
That episode might seem like a footnote in the long rivalry between those two storied firms, but for Pick, it now looks like something more.
At 52, he’s in the running for the top job at Morgan Stanley, while Cohn, 60, has receded into the business background after his stint in the Trump White House.
Blunt and almost gleefully profane in years past, Pick has helped Morgan Stanley’s investment bank go toe to toe with its nemesis. In Goldman Sachs v. Morgan Stanley—the Harvard-Yale Game of Wall Street, and the industry’s most enduring rivalry—Pick’s firm is no longer the underdog. The very markets in which the pair compete value Morgan Stanley about $37 billion more, or 28% higher, than Goldman.
Pick’s rise is an unlikely arc for a man who was the last person hired into his analyst class three decades ago. He was immediately assigned to a cramped, rank-smelling room with a datafeed machine. After that came a circuitous climb through the bank’s Wall Street businesses, from the world of hot tech IPOs like Google’s to the rough-and-tumble trading floor. Then last month, Morgan Stanley elevated him to co-president, putting Pick one spot away from potentially becoming chief executive officer.
As he’s moved into the top ranks, he’s had to ground his flying f-bombs.
“If we were full of s---, he told us we were full of s--- and we loved that,” said Tony James, vice chairman at investing giant Blackstone Group Inc., which Pick helped take public. “Back in the old days, he was a trader and spoke that lingo. Over the years, he’s become much more of a polished presenter.”
Pick was the reason Blackstone tapped Morgan Stanley to lead the initial public offering in 2007, said James. He illustrated that point by describing how he invited Pick to join a fly-fishing expedition after the deal, flying to the jungles of Brazil in pursuit of the famed peacock bass.
Much of the group was filled with hardcore anglers wearing special gear while Pick, armed with a last-minute lesson at New York’s Central Park, showed up on the boat in the Amazon decked out in leather loafers.
“You’ve never seen anyone throw their whole body into the cast like Ted Pick,” James said.
This description of Pick’s journey at the bank is based on conversations with colleagues and associates. A representative for Morgan Stanley declined to comment. When asked about the lore at Morgan Stanley, a spokesperson for Cohn said he would’ve referred to them as healthy competition that isn’t going away, in an effort to motivate his own team.
Shrinking Office
Pick spent most of his early stint as a capital-markets banker, helping companies raise money by selling stock. But that changed after the 2008 financial crisis.
He was thrust into leading the equities unit at a time when the bank was hemorrhaging clients and rivals were openly disparaging its viability. Under Pick, the unit went from hobbled to healthy, and it soon charged past competitors to a No. 1 ranking. Morgan Stanley pulled in almost $10 billion from the division last year.
Along the way, he gained notoriety for a unique style of leadership. After getting worked up about the size of another executive’s office, feeling it was too big for his position, Pick called in a construction crew over the weekend and had the walls moved to shrink the room.
After his success in equities, he got another challenge: resuscitate the fixed-income division, the bank’s perennial sick child that struggled to keep pace with larger rivals. He started in 2015 and soon pared almost a quarter of the workforce in that business. The division’s recovery since then is now touted as a success story by the bank’s leadership.
Then in 2018, Pick was given additional oversight of the firm’s dealmaking unit. But the mandate there was easier: Don’t break it.
There have been sore spots.
The prime brokerage division that Pick helped build into Morgan Stanley’s crown jewel, got caught wrong-footed in March when Bill Hwang’s Archegos Capital Management collapsed. The revelation that Morgan Stanley lost $911 million on dealings with the family office outed it as U.S. banking’s biggest loser in the debacle.