I stumbled upon an old article by Michael Lewis, the author of the best-selling book “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt” and thought some of you might find it intriguing. Bankers are apparently turning to transcendental meditation to alleviate the otherwise intolerable stress of their work. Poor lambs. I have picked some of the interesting comments in the article and here you go. “Do we have a drum roll please?”
I discovered that I’m not the only extremely distinguished Wall Street trader whose life is more difficult than ordinary people understand. Looking over the stories that people have been emailing to one another over the past few months, I see the anxiety of financiers hitting new highs, old bankers have been killing themselves.
Young bankers, burned out by their 90-hours-a-week jobs, have been quitting in droves to work for start-ups; hedge-fund managers are now telling the public that the stock market feels so dangerous that they are selling their holdings and going into cash.
The most widely circulated horror story was about people giving up golf. Apparently, Wall Street guys have been fleeing their game because their anxiety has them feeling they need to text all the time and they can’t free up their hands long enough to swing the club. It’s like we’ve all become teenage girls.
So maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised that the story that got all of Wall Street’s attention was about a hot new stress reduction strategy: transcendental meditation. Several of my esteemed hedge-fund colleagues apparently actually do this. David Ford told Bloomberg Pursuits that his mantra helped him make a killing in the emerging markets crash – and he isn’t alone.
“Ford is part of a growing number of Wall Street traders, including A-list hedge-fund managers Ray Dalio, Paul Tudor Jones and Michael Novogratz, who are fine-tuning their brains – and upping their games – with meditation,” said the story, which went on to say that the TM classes at Goldman have a waiting list of hundreds.
Personally, I would find it stressful, if I worked at Goldman Sachs (which, thank God, I don’t!) to be on a waiting list for anything. Why can’t they just buy as many gurus as they need? But I digress. The point of this crazy meditation article was how much money a guy can make these days just from staying calm.
