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blackomen
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09 Sep 2009, 7:22 pm

Disregarding the current state of the economy, is it possible for someone with Aspergers to succeed at Investment Banking if they're passionate about it, is fairly outgoing, can communicate very well verbally, but is lacking in nonverbal communication?



Tim_Tex
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09 Sep 2009, 7:24 pm

I don't see why not.


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Apple_in_my_Eye
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10 Sep 2009, 2:35 am

I remember long ago on a different board someone mentioned being an investment banker. Sounded like she had done pretty well, and said something like, "it's a field that isn't known for being warm and fuzzy [so it worked out]." I don't remember precisely what the job/position was, though.


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Logan5
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20 Sep 2009, 3:16 pm

Blackomen, I do not work in finance, but you might want to read Michael Lewis's book Liar's Poker, in which he describes his experiences working as an investment banker in the late 1980s. Here is a related quote from a long, but worth reading article written by him:

"To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.
I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance."
- The End, by Michael Lewis
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/n ... reets-Boom

Another interesting article by Michael Lewis,
The Man Who Crashed the World
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feat ... /aig200908

One more article, by a different writer (Andy Kessler),
Lehman And Meritocracy
http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/14/lehman ... ssler.html


Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide to do.



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21 Sep 2009, 12:35 am

I have heard that the rules of wall street are changing rapidly because of the economic bust, and reasons that logan5 mentioned in his post... which is probably a good thing. If you want to be an investment banker, at the minimum you will need some ability to impress your potential employer... the degree component is the beginning, but often they look for leadership qualities, extra curicular/professional involvement beyond what you may have. While there are numbers and data involved, a lot of banking seems like a nightmare for a person with AS. I guess the only way to know for sure is for you to do it and find out what it's like?



FreeSpirit2000
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21 Jan 2010, 6:33 pm

Investment Banking is probably the most hectic job out there, you work 80-90 hours, you have to deal with millions of people and clients, and this ain't a job for the typical human beings. It requires multi tasking, it requires extra hard work to land this kind of job, and the market for this field is very unstable. Note, this isn't the job for your average joe. Heck, this must be even too hard for your average NT even.



FreeSpirit2000
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27 Jan 2010, 10:43 pm

blackomen wrote:
Disregarding the current state of the economy, is it possible for someone with Aspergers to succeed at Investment Banking if they're passionate about it, is fairly outgoing, can communicate very well verbally, but is lacking in nonverbal communication?


If you want to work an I-Bank maybe work in the Operations/IT division or work in Research or Sales and Trading, these seem the most AS freindly positions in a place like this.



lotuspuppy
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29 Jan 2010, 7:50 pm

I think middle or back office operations are the most Aspie friendly. Otherwise, I think we're well suited to be investment bankers.