Has anyone else read the Business Week article describing how brats from Ivy League colleges have started investment clubs to give them an edge on getting into a Wall Street bank? Is there anything more unattractive than a twenty something who is desperate to be an I-banker? Read the article, it makes all the desperados on this board look like Peace Corps/Teach America angels.
"An $800 "position" tripled in value...........a $2,300 "position" has declined in value..........we, as multi-lingual students, can do better due diligence than Wall Street." You have to be able to laugh AND cry at the article. Obsession with the stock market, especially with progressively younger people, usually occurs at market tops.
The idiot does not even realize just how stupid it is to tell the world that he bought into a micro-cap Chinese company which listed via a reverse merger and he goes on to tell everyone how he "grilled" the managers in Chinese because we can all believe how easy it is to master fluent Chinese just by spending a year in China. These kids are not obsessed by the market. In fact, it is not likely that they would know the first thing about the market. What they are fixated on is getting a well paid and prestigious job at a major bank or consulting firm. They have no ideals beyond making sure that they can afford all the nice stuff that their peers cannot have. With the worst Wall Street job market in recent memory, I am glad that most of these kids will fail.
Being one of those 'ivy league' brats, I stopped by one of the investment clubs. They are laughably bad. On the other hand, there are quite a few bright students who have started more private clubs -- which require a bigger buy in, but tend to use much more complex strategies, normally involving derivatives (which most of the regular investment club attendees barely understand)... It seems that the club the article discusses does not happen to be one of those clubs. But as a whole, the number of students who have decided they want to be 'i-bankers' is just ridiculous. Every single business major I talk to is trying to get a job on Wall Street. On the other hand ... I bet these students are a lot better than most analysts (not that they make much of a base line...)
I went back to school after working in computers for a few years and am on track to graduate next spring with a degree in finance. Great time to do so, right? Maybe I should change over to the personal financial planning/financial services track. Then I can get a CFP and help baby boomers plan their finances.
You would be amazed by how many students want to be I-bankers when they know nothing about the job or hours required. They want the prestige without doing the work.
a worthless article the summation of investment 'knowledge' of all those students equals less than that of the janitor at one of those schools.
I would totally agree. Business Week is a trash publication written by and for MBA morons or wannabes. How anyone can glorify the antics of rich kids who are desperate to preserve the privileges they grew up with is beyond me. But Business Week has no qualms about pandering to its brain dead somma fed audience. This is just the sort of thing McGraw-Hill with its legacy admissions protocol can be expected to support with whole hearted sincerity.