1. The Chip Babe Goes Down


    Date: 9/15/2015, Categories: Cheating, Author: VirgoGo, Rating: 12, Source: LushStories

    "The stake that sticks out gets hammered down" was the warning my mother gave me when I decided to work at a hedge fund. I'd just gotten my MBA from Wharton, and I wanted to go toe to toe with the big boys. The fact that there were only a few women working as analysts seemed like an asset, not a liability, to me. And yet she couldn't resist casting a pall over my decision. I would stick out, sure. But there was no fucking way I would let myself get hammered. *** Working as a stock analyst is a lot like working as an investigative journalist. You learn your industry. You analyze and model the performance of its key companies and divisions. You establish a network of sources, and you cultivate them relentlessly. You are constantly scanning your space for an insight that no one else possesses. But instead of publishing that insight openly, in a place like The Wall Street Journal , you share it with your colleagues who trade on it. Ideally, this makes you and your firm a lot of money. It didn't take long, but I quickly discovered where my competitive advantage lay. While Wharton had burnished my capacity to count, my parents’ Nordic DNA had provided blonde hair and a slim physique. My gender was my differentiating asset. The founders of the Drekar Group, my employer, were cunning when they made technology my beat. Women are tragically scarce among its leaders. Moreover, its leaders are often the guys who struggled to get a date in high school. I was once a cheerleader. I've ...
    known nerd-lust since I was 16. I immersed myself in the rigors and challenges of learning about an industry obsessed chips and fabs. If there was a conference in Barcelona, I was taking notes in every session and stalking the hotel lobbies. A tradeshow in Shenzen? I’d walk the floor and hang out at the hotel bar. I’ve probably attended every MeetUp in Silicon Valley. Where ever the industry hangs out and talks shop, you could find me wearing a form fitting dress in some eye catching color with my hair smooth and perfect thanks to twice weekly blowouts. Yes, I used my sex appeal. Why wouldn’t I? My bonus in my first year was $200K. But once I started gleaning really good, actionable intelligence, I was earning nine or ten times that. When I first hired into Drekar Group, it was a small, hungry hedge fund, with less than a billion under management. My colleagues and I performed very well, beating the indices and our peers for two years in a row. And with that success, we attracted more investors. Soon, we had over $8 billion to deploy. More money sounds like more opportunities, but as you get bigger, it gets tougher to move the needle. You need bigger investments, bigger trades, bigger wins to satisfy the whiny investors who foolishly expect past performance to predict their returns. As a result, there was more and more pressure on analysts like me to find bigger and better opportunities for Drekar to exploit. It didn’t take long, but the dresses started getting tighter and ...
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