Arthur Main learned the hard way that Wall Street is a young person’s game.
After a quarter-century at Morgan Stanley, Main -- like countless old-school types who came of age in the ’80s -- was kicked to the curb as banks turn to youth and technology in the face of tighter regulation and lower profits.
And so, at 54, he’s working at one of the last stops in high finance: a small Chicago firm called TJM Institutional Services. He considers himself lucky.
“Being my age is a hindrance for a lot of people,” says Main, keeping his eyes fixed on charts and chat boxes arrayed across his computer screens. “They don’t continue to learn, they don’t embrace technology, they try to fit that square peg in the round hole, and their skill set doesn’t apply anymore.”
From the ninth floor of a modest office building wedged between a 7-Eleven and shoe-repair shop, TJM is making a name for itself as a refuge for Wall Street’s graying castaways. The idea is that by using their wits, experience and connections, they can still produce by getting hedge funds and pensions to trade with them in niches where computers have yet to take over.
For Main and others like him, it’s a shot at finishing their careers in finance.
“I’m the home for the last of the Mohicans,” says Steven Beitler, TJM’s chief executive officer. “Everyone we’re hiring is coming from a bank. The market for talent has been the best I’ve seen it, because they’re all getting fired.”
Generational Cull
In the new Wall Street, there are simply fewer jobs. Post-crisis rules to curb risk-taking and shrinking bond-trading revenues have compelled banks to cut costs. Electronic trading platforms have let clients bypass salespeople. In the past five years alone, the biggest global firms have cut almost 10,000 trading and investment banking jobs, according to research firm Coalition Ltd. Older, higher-paid traders and salespeople have been especially vulnerable.
Cheerful and profane, Beitler, and his partner Thomas J. Murphy, are taking advantage. In the past three years, TJM has doubled in size to 160 contractors. They’ve added brokers in government bonds, equities and currencies, and opened outposts in New York, Boca Raton and London.