Liar’s Poker

Lewis begins his work in London as a “geek,” or rookie, salesman. His bosses, “on average ten to fifteen years my senior and old hands in high finance,” are more interested “establishing relationships with customers” than in trying to sell them the latest type of bond (192).

Salomon wants to become a worldwide powerhouse; it focuses on London, which is an easier adjustment for staff than its Japanese branch is and less regulated, as well. Lewis works at the London office for a little over two years, during which time staff expands from 150 to 900, they move to a new and much larger building, and “[t]ens of millions of dollars were poured into our operation by the men on the forty-first floor in New York” (193).

Lewis works for manager Dick Leahy and assistant manager Leslie Christian, selling bond options and futures. They help teach him the ropes, becoming what Salomon workers call “rabbis.” Lewis likes his bosses for their easygoing natures: “Rabbi Christian and Rabbi Leahy told me to find any way I could to make money and not to worry too much about pushing options and futures” (195). Leahy’s manager, Stu Willicker, “paid almost no attention to what he was told to do and encouraged his charges to intransigence […] He let us cut office meetings and work our own hours” (196). Still, Willicker’s department “was the most profitable unit in the office, year in and year out” (196).

Lewis learns how to sell, how to work with the traders, “and, most important, how to spot the difference between a financial opportunity and a rip-off” (196). He befriends a brilliant young trader whom he calls Dash Riprock, who dispenses cryptic wisdom: “‘Buy two-year notes and short old tens,’ or ‘Short Salomon’s stock,’ or ‘Save a client, shoot a geek’” (197). Short-selling, or betting against, Salomon is unlawful, and Dash is kidding, but his point is that their firm has become a “stultifying hierarchy” (198), and its glory days are numbered.

To Dash, the worst sign is that Salomon’s seventy-fifth anniversary gifts to each employee are an engraved silver-plated bowl and a book about the company that paints its conniving executives as wise and noble leaders. He feels that “[e]ven to a trainee, the book was a ridiculous cover-up job” (198). Salomon’s leadership has abandoned the old camaraderie for respectability.

Dash critiques Lewis: “He was fond of saying that as a geek I bore the stamp of whomever I had last spoken with” (200). Lewis learns not to trust blindly information from the traders.

Lewis and four other salespeople work at crowded desks, each with three phones that blink constantly “from eight in the morning until eight at night” (201). Lewis’s team sells options and futures, which offer an opportunity, for a fraction of the price, to partake of the profits (or losses) of a large number of bonds: “The attraction of options and futures, our specialty item, was that they offered both liquidity and fantastic leverage” (201).

Europeans love drawing charts of market activity and investing superstitiously, “[b]ut as long as the chartists placed their bets with me, my jungle guide explained, the reasoning of our customers was not for me to question” (203). Lewis practices on investors with less than $100 million in capital; if he accidentally ruins one, the damage will be small, and “once I’d stopped blowing up customers, I would be permitted to advise the big investors” (204).

Lewis’s first sale is for Herman, an Austrian banker. On the advice of a Salomon trader, Lewis talks him into a series of trades that involve buying AT&T bonds. It turns out that “[e]veryone in London but Herman and I, it seemed, knew that Salomon Brothers owned AT&Ts and had been desperate to unload them” (206). Dash, hearing of the trade, tells Lewis he will get screwed on the deal, but “[t]hat’s all right because you’re just a geek” (206).

Lewis confronts the trader, who responds, “‘Who do you work for, this guy or Salomon Brothers?’” (207). Tom Strauss tells Lewis not to worry: “‘Customers have very short memories’” (208). Lewis calls Herman, who is furious, but “[t]hat was the beauty of being a middleman, which I did not appreciate until that moment. The customer suffered. I didn’t” (210). Herman, however, is fired from the Austrian bank.

Lewis ruins more customers as he learns the ropes. His clients are an eccentric bunch, and he finds his work “highly entertaining” (213). He befriends “Alexander,” a brilliant salesman who moves from London to Salomon in New York but continues to mentor Lewis over the phone daily. Alexander tells him, for example, to “buy potatoes” from America when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor melts down because European spuds will be rendered worthless from radiation (218). Combining Alexander’s investment genius with Dash’s telephone sales smarts and his own nonchalance—Lewis hedges his career by moonlighting as a journalist—his skills grow, and his customers begin to make profits.

Within months, Lewis is “plugged into several of the largest pools of money in Europe” (223). Salomon needs to get an Arab investor out from under some bonds that nobody else wants, and Lewis convinces his best customer, a French speculator, to buy and hold them. Lewis feels guilty about the deal, but the top brass lavish praise on him. He is mollified when they anoint him with the cherished rank of “Big Swinging Dick.”