Morning Coffee: 23-year-old 'banker' with six vests was secretly not working. 20 hour days in trading

This month's photoshoot titled 'Meet the Finest Boys in Finance' has prompted a cascade of warnings to young people in finance who think that appearing in a magazine wearing a Rolex and boasting about the number of vests your own is a good thing. Employers do not take kindly to such transgressions. However, it turns out that one of Boys was not employed in finance when the magazine was published anyway. 

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Business Insider reports that 23-year-old Demarre Johnson, who told Interview Magazine that he owned six vests and a painting costing $1.4k, while working 55 hour weeks as a data, tech and AI analyst for PWC, is no longer employed by the Big Four firm. Nor is he responding to messages. Johnson may simply be between jobs, but his disappearance casts aspersions on his new fame as a finance pin up.

It's tempting to think that Johnson was ditched by PWC after appearing in the photoshoot and then conducting follow-up interviews, but this isn't so. PWC says he left in February, before his vests went public. In this context, Johnson's new fame looks like an exercise in pushing his Instagram and TikTok channels and is a reminder that there are other ways to make money than data analysis right now. 

Johnson isn't the only finance influencer with an occluded reality. As we reported last month, a Bank of America junior who runs a TikTok account “notbadjuju” seems to work in an investment banking job, but was shifted into the middle office when Bank of America cut jobs last year.

Separately, one of the revelations of the Finest Boys in Finance was that working hours in sales and trading are usually gentle compared to those in investment banking. However, this is not so if you work in oil trading at this juncture.

Instead of the gentle 50-55 hour weeks of junior FX traders, Bloomberg reports that some oil traders have begun waking up at 6am and starting at their screens until 2am. The situation is particularly acute in Singapore as a result of Asian reliance on oil and gas imports from the Middle East. US traders are feeling it too. One observes that millions of dollars can be lost in seconds. He advises his traders to drink less so that they don't have to visit the bathroom: “You never take your eyes off the screen.”

Meanwhile...

Investment bankers are expected to look successful to their clients but otherwise project a studied modesty. Overt displays of wealth by juniors are discouraged. Juniors with designer briefcases or monogrammed shirts are mocked. (FT)

Hedge funds are using exotic hybrid options to trade cross-market gyrations. UBS  strategists favor equity down / rates up hybrids and still tout the traditional stagflation payoff of equity down / gold up. (Bloomberg)

BTIG wants to hire 100 investment bankers in New York and Miami beach. (Bloomberg) 

Open AI and Anthropic want hedge fund talent. “AI firms are hiring top quants and data scientists to learn domain knowledge. These AI models have hit a limit on recursive feedback; learning from pre-training and training. So now they have to learn the domain knowledge to continue to evolve better.” (Financial News) 

Suddenly, building lots of big glass buildings in the Gulf seems a bad idea. (Bloomberg) 

Shanghai was once a leading financial centre but an exodus of wealthy Shanghainese after 1949 helped transfer that status to Hong Kong. (Bloomberg) 

Mamdani wants to slash New York state’s estate tax exemption threshold by almost 90%, from a more than $7 million limit to $750,000, and raise the top estate tax rate from 16% to 50%. (Bloomberg) 

33 year old Tomi Mikula makes $200k in revenue a month helping negotiate car purchases. He also works from home. (WSJ) 

Leah Wood, 31, a model and designer and the daughter of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood is married to Jack MacDonald, a banker specialising in entertainment deals who worked for Credit Suisse. She says Ronnie Wood has not given them much money. "My husband and I have had to work our arses off. Having kids and stuff, our mortgage to pay and, you know, trying to find X amount of money to fix the old stone wall." (The Times)

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