Around the same time as the options mishap in 2013, in another glass-and-steel office tower about 4 miles north of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley traders were digging themselves out of a hole.

Clients had abandoned the company during the financial crisis as subprime losses pushed Morgan Stanley to the edge of failure. The bank had caught a case of Goldman envy and plowed into mortgage-bond bets at precisely the wrong time. To survive a share plunge driven by short sellers, then-CEO John Mack lashed out at some of the same clients who paid them lucrative fees. The bank was saved by a $9 billion investment from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., but in the years immediately after the crisis, it seemed a shadow of its former self. An equities executive at a rival U.S. bank puts it this way: “I thought we left them for dead in 2010. I remember telling people, ‘These guys are roadkill.’”

But the financial crisis had one gift for Morgan Stanley. Other banks that built a following with quants were damaged as well. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. went bankrupt. Three European banks—Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Barclays—didn’t adapt quickly enough to the new realities and were later forced to raise capital, sowing doubt among prime brokerage clients. So for hedge fund clients who wanted the latest trading technology, Morgan Stanley became the clear choice.

Under Ted Pick, who became co-head of the equities business in 2009, the company went about persuading clients to come home. The bank was back, hungry and open for business, flush with liquidity for hedge funds to place bets. It emerged with a sharper focus: The new CEO, James Gorman, made it clear that the equities division, along with the company’s wealth management business, was key to the bank’s strategic vision.

A paradox seen among some senior equities executives is that despite their high status and net worth, they often dress slightly shabbily. It might be intentional, part of the pitch: We don’t care what we look like. It’s all about you, valued client.

Pick, 49, fits this description. The day he meets with a reporter, he’s got on a pair of beat-up loafers and a well-worn suit. He could use a haircut and a couple more hours of sleep. The walls of his office are bare except for some grainy photos of his children. His only windows face the equities trading floor: Densely packed with employees and computers, the vast room feels 5 degrees warmer than comfortable. Instead of being sequestered in offices, his managing directors are scattered amid their charges, the better to stay close to clients and the thrum of markets.

Pick’s fervor for Morgan Stanley borders on the maniacal. Atop a mahogany cabinet—inherited from his predecessor, Vikram Pandit—are rows of manila folders filled with the minutiae of more than 30 quarters of equities results. Shortly after taking over the stock division, he divided the world into nine boxes—cash equities, derivatives, and prime brokerage across the Americas, Europe, and Asia—with the goal of improving in every segment. The full spectrum of offerings meant that whatever strategy or region a client needed in a given environment, Morgan Stanley was there. Pick keeps a close watch on all this data and, when the mood strikes, pulls out a folder to recite figures from a long-ago period.

The company made investments that let clients send orders with the least possible delay by moving servers closer to exchanges and using wires that shaved microseconds off the process. It updated its low-latency trading system Speedway and, in 2012, embarked on Project Velocity, which anticipated the rising needs of quants and other institutions that were embracing algorithmic trading. The improvements strengthened what was already a leading electronic platform; almost a decade earlier, Morgan Stanley had been the first major broker to create an electronic swaps system, the preferred mode for quants to trade in equities. Quants favor the system because it gives them leveraged exposure to stocks without owning them and having to pay taxes on dividends.

With the upgraded electronic system and revamped prime brokerage, Morgan Stanley enveloped clients in a cocoon of lightning-fast connectivity to markets everywhere and liquidity to short stocks. Its systems were robust enough for the biggest quants, and it could lease pipes and algorithms to smaller hedge funds that couldn’t afford the technological investments the company made.

It all paid off. In 2014 the company grabbed the crown from Goldman Sachs, exceeding its rival in equities revenue for the first time in almost a decade. Under Pick, Morgan Stanley had gone from the recovery ward to the summit of the world’s most iconic market in four short years. And yet reaching the pinnacle hasn’t dulled their drive: Pick says they’re as hungry now as they were in 2010.

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