by
Carrie Sun
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WHEN I WAS TWENTY-FIVE, working as an analyst at Fidelity Investments, I made over three hundred thousand dollars. I took my bonus, went to the Bloomingdale’s outside of Boston, tried on dozens of pairs of shoes, and left empty-handed. Some part of me felt jealous of people for whom money seemed to bring joy, ease, and happiness. A confirmation that they were on the right path. Gold diggers, I envied them—and anyone else who knew exactly what they wanted. Right around then, I started dating someone with money, the same man who, over time, feared that my career aspirations might conflict with his plans for me to be a doll in his house. We flew in his family’s private jet to his family’s multiple homes. But the more money I made and the more I was surrounded by wealth, the more I found myself recoiling from it all. I planned my getaway and quit Fidelity after four and a half years, hoping to do a pivot. Two months later I started on a new path at the University of Pennsylvania, enrolled in a joint-degree program between the School of Arts & Sciences and the Wharton School of Business. When I arrived on campus, I found myself steeped in a culture that seemed to prioritize drinking and partying over working and studying. So suboptimal, so inefficient. A colossal waste of time. This was the culture from which I was trying to escape, evinced by an offhand remark a coworker at Fidelity made to me one night: “I basically sit on my ass and do nothing and make millions. What could be better than that?”
nah you're right to be suspicious of it
[...] “How are you with positive feedback? Because I don’t give it.” That’s fine: I had a Korean piano teacher who was not one for positive reinforcement; plus, my mom’s Chinese. I avoided alluding to Amy Chua because I did not believe I had a tiger mother; not once did Mom (or Dad) ask to see my report card. (Although they did find a way to comment on all other parts of my life—how I chewed at the wrong pace or smiled at the wrong width—I was determined to excel at everything so they would have méi huà jiǎng, a phrase used when something was so good, there would be no words speak.) [...]
annoying ... one step above cut fruit poetry
But none of the perks mattered. When Josh met my best friend from college for the first time, he described me as “a fish in a fish tank.” My friend’s exact words to me after the double date were “What the actual fuck.” I shrugged. I had only just begun to understand what had been troubling me so much about our relationship: He needed a say in everything. Josh said he found it sexy when I ate only lettuce. He said he wanted me to wear more makeup, higher heels, skimpier outfits, and, when I said I would prefer not to, he said, “Why can’t you do it for me, if you love me?” He said if he and I disagreed—and we did, a lot, debating everything from the problem of free will to whether my nonbelief in seeking retribution meant that I did not believe in justice—then I should change my beliefs to match his because he was, I quote, “the man.” Over that summer, I felt like the hand of God had fished me out of still water and placed me in a river. I did not need to be single; I needed a partner who would not try to build enclosures. After I called Josh and told him I was choosing neither him nor Boone but, in fact, myself, he said, “I’ll pay you more than whatever Boone is paying you not to take the job.” I hung up.
damn girl
In the late nineties, the funds’ investor base began to change from individuals (who, on the whole, maintained their allocations in hedge funds) to institutions, led by David Swensen, head of Yale’s endowment. Swensen pioneered the endowment model, turning a portfolio invested mostly in marketable securities like stocks and bonds—which convert easily into cash—into a portfolio invested mostly in alternatives like hedge funds, private equity, and real estate—assets that are more illiquid and higher fee in expectation of higher returns. He spun around $1 billion in 1985 into $10 billion by 2000. Encouraged by his performance, others followed suit. Pensions, endowments, foundations, and other institutional money meant new sources of untapped capital, providing significant inflows. By the early aughts, the investor base had switched from mostly individuals to mostly institutions and funds of funds. Total AUM in the industry swelled to about $2 trillion in the second quarter of 2008.
Then came the financial crisis. Hedge funds suffered in 2008 but not as much as the market, with the average fund down 18 percent compared to 38 percent for the S&P 500. Asset allocators lost confidence, redeeming $382 billion that year. There’s some debate about the role of hedge funds in the crisis: most narratives say while they weren’t one of the main causes of the collapse of the economy, they withdrew assets and sold securities at such large scales that they further destabilized the financial system. Those who survived were wounded but not dead. Several managers made prescient calls and corresponding fortunes. Hedge funds were seen by many in finance—not by the public, who had a strong and justifiably negative view of all of Wall Street—as, still, the place to make your bets; they weren’t the baddest of the bad guys. From 1990 to 2009 the average stock hedge fund beat the S&P 500 total return by over 5 percent a year. Yes, there were flops, notably Long-Term Capital Management, a fund helmed by, among others, two Nobel laureates who had mismodeled risk (and as a result, during the 1998 ruble crisis, their fund imploded)—but, by and large, hedge funds continued to deliver. In 2010 there were 7,200 funds managing over $1.5 trillion. They embodied the American dream at its peak: anyone could start a fund; with hard work, and good luck, anyone could get rich.
The external conference rooms. Paget, Etna, Meru.
The lobby. A gray couch, white pillows. A jar of gray and white M&M’s. A gray rug tessellated with stones, rocks, and pebbles. A wall with a single work of art: a mountain peak.
“And this is Everest,” Courtney said, stopping in front of double glass doors that led to the fourth and largest external conference room. [...]
the guy likes mountains huh
Then he went over the expectations. Maximize efficiency. Positive, “can do” attitude. No ego, productive, high return on time. When he was explaining the fourth expectation—kindness, professionalism, going the extra mile—I found myself diving headlong into the rapids. He said he cared deeply about doing the right thing. About morality. Before Carbon I had told myself I would never get emotionally involved with work or school again. I had been burned before by loving institutions that did not love me back; by believing that goodness and equity and justice were possible at places with elite reputations and capitalist interests to protect. Since middle school, I had valued maximizing my day (defined primarily by the quantity and quality of work completed) alongside, and equally with, being a good person. In no way did I flawlessly achieve these goals, but I tried. I cared. And Boone—he appeared to be those two values incarnate.
It was then, toward the end of my first sit with Boone on my first day of work, I became a believer again. I believed in the possibility of good billionaires. I believed in good returns and good performance and that you and I and anyone who wanted to could be a good person at a hedge fund. I also believed that the game was about more than just money. Believing in him meant that I could luxuriate in my innocence, hold on to ideals. I did not have to restructure my understanding of the world.
aw girl
The gardens held up to three thousand people. Carbon’s New York headquarters had fewer than a hundred employees. The venue appeared to have more staff serving burgers and operating rides than it did guests. The first image I saw as I entered the grounds has been etched into my mind: the children of Carbon employees stepping into teacups, jumping onto swings, having fun, all alone, entire rides operating for the entertainment of a few little ones. I saw happy, shrieking kids blissfully ignorant of their privileges, and wheels and planes and roller coasters—a world—that spun exclusively for them. The whole operation struck me as sad. Kids want to be near other kids. But the space between them—and the public—was too much.
That was what I believed, anyway, and not without reason: My first day included an orientation with the rest of the investment associate (post-college) and analyst (post-MBA) class who were hired to do equity research. There were maybe thirty of us: half associates, half analysts; a few women. During one of the sessions, a senior portfolio manager gave us a pep talk about our collective purpose. He retrieved a letter from his pocket and began reading it aloud; it was from someone who’d invested in his fund, thanking him for his good performance over the years that had enabled the letter writer’s children to go to college. To make possible the education of future generations—what could be more meaningful than this?
idk maybe like STRUCTURAL REFORM lol
I had tried to leave Fido before because of its culture. One day, after a year or so at my job, I walked into a recruiter’s office—I remember the early sun straining to warm up the dark, wooden room—and he looked at me across the table and said, “You have two strikes against you already: you’re a woman, and you’re Asian.” I never saw this recruiter (who himself was of Asian descent) again. Through other avenues, I interviewed at a few places, though nothing panned out. Then, in 2008, the economy collapsed. I stayed put. Fidelity whittled its workforce. My two associate friends weren’t given promotions and had to leave. I was promoted, and a year later promoted again, to a co–portfolio manager, but I was not sure I deserved any of this: workers around the world were losing their jobs, homes, and retirement savings as I watched my base and bonus and profit sharing go up and up and up with, honestly, very little effort on my part—and this felt cosmically wrong. I did not feel like I was adding value to the world. I felt insulated from harm, disconnected from humanity. I had to get out. I did not report the sexual harassment because there was, I thought then, no point. The people to whom I would report it—HR and my higher-ups, about whom I had heard rumors of extramarital affairs with people they had either met at or through work—I saw as part of the problem.
cool
I wish I remembered more from Jamie’s talk, but I don’t, probably because I had heard it before. My mind wandered to his address to the Harvard Business School Class of 2009, which I had used as a model for today. Jamie had lectured for forty minutes and sounded wise and sincere and authentic while saying nothing that any person who cared about ethics and morality would ever disagree with. At least five times he said “Do the right thing.” “It’s not what you say . . . it’s actually what you do.” “Treat [people] all the same, whether they’re clerks or CEOs.” (I forgave him for not noticing me earlier.) Jamie said he valued, in order of importance, family, humanity, country, then his company. J.P. Morgan—last. I did not, for a second, doubt that he believed he held those values. I believed he believed every syllable he spoke, including what he said about self-deception: “I do it all the time. It’s one of my favorite things to do.” But there are the values we say we have, and the values we strive to have. There are also the values we believe we have in order to live, not to die of the horror of seeing a stranger in the mirror.