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Mix-Ansicht- US-BROKER manisch-depressiv: Diagnosing Brokers' Depression by Landon Thomas Jr. - Der letzte Grund, 10.08.2001, 19:13
US-BROKER manisch-depressiv: Diagnosing Brokers' Depression by Landon Thomas Jr.
To Live and Throw Up on Wall Street: Diagnosing Brokers' Depression
by Landon Thomas Jr.
The markets have crashed; the buyers are in retreat. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley both announced cutbacks in their retail stock-flogging ranks. Analysts like Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker and Merrill Lynch’s Henry Blodget have been named in class-action suits filed by investors.
Retail brokers, the weary men on the front lines, have lost their clients’ money—as well as much of their own—and now are getting sued by their customers, who, it seems, hate them.
“A lot of these guys have manic-depressive personalities that are enhanced by the volatility of the market. They also lack the insight or the coping skills to deal with the stresses of the market,” said Mr. Cass. “As a result, it’s natural to find higher levels of depression amongst them.” He said he thinks he has the empirical evidence to support his case.
"I blame myself for everything bad that happens; I am critical of myself for my weaknesses or mistakes; I don’t get satisfaction out of anything anymore; I worry that this job is hardening me emotionally; I have trouble going to work in the morning.
One of the subjects was Ned Merrill—not his real name—a 30-year-old with a wife and a brand-new condo in Brooklyn. Each day he reports to his Wall Street office at 7:30 a.m., flicks on his computer screen and starts on the 100 calls he will make to doctors and lawyers around the city. There was a time when he made 600 a day.
He doesn’t want to make the calls—nine out of 10 will hang up on him—he hates doing it, in fact, but times are tough; for the first six months of 2001, he didn’t take home one penny. In 1999, he made $500,000 in commissions.
“Except for my mortgage, I’m behind in everything,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact. “I’ve liquidated every investment I’ve ever had; I’ve got $25,000 in credit-card debt, and now I’m dipping into my 401(k). Two years ago, it would have meant nothing to me to be walking down the street, see a thousand-dollar painting and buy it, just because I liked it.”
These days, there are no paintings, just nightmares. “I’ve been having them every day,” he said. “It’s been driving me crazy. One time, our dog attacked us, then a neighbor came in through the terrace and a close friend came crying to me that he was depressed. I get about three hours of sleep a night. I wake up with eye twitches, neck twitches, everything twitches.” He has also developed a bad case of eczema, with his skin frequently breaking out in a hot, itchy rash.
Indeed, most days, when the full force of another bright, shiny day shakes Mr. Merrill from his fitful slumber, he would prefer to spend the day in bed. But he gets up and goes to work. “I have palpitations every day,” he said. “Yeah, for the most part I’m depressed.” His voice was low and heavy. “It’s not really myself that I hate, it’s my life. I hate my life. There always seems to be something.”
Now that the great bull market has withered away, the buyers feel snookered and the salesmen have nothing left to sell. Currently, the vogue is to blame it all on your broker—that sweet-talking dream peddler who made the giddy case to you that a position in JDS Uniphase at $140 would set you up for retirement. Now, with JDS at $10, you hate his guts and want to sue him. You can’t even get him on the phone anymore. Well, there’s a reason he’s not taking your calls: His pain is greater than yours.
“These guys are blaming themselves for the market correction and for picking the wrong stocks,” said Mr. Cass. “It’s the cognitive theory of depression—negative thoughts will lead to negative emotions. If you really think, ‘I’m a horrible person because this stock went down,’ that’s irrational behavior, and that’s when the depression hits.”
Ned Merrill remembers when the market turned on him: It was April 2000, and he had piled all of his and his clients’ money into ICG Communications, Global Crossing and Healtheon, now WebMD—all bull-market tech stocks, their charts straight arrows pointing to the sky. When his world started collapsing around him, his pain was physical, a churning in his gut. Sitting there in his coat and tie, his screen blinking red, his stocks plunging 10 percent a day, the screams and yells of his margined-to-the-eyeballs clients pounding in his head, he got sick.
“I was throwing up in the garbage pail right by my desk,” he recalls. “You have to realize: This was not like Intel going from 40 to 20. At least then, you still have the stock. My guys were on margin—their stocks went to zero and they still owed $10,000. You try telling a client whose stock has gone to zero that he still owes 10,000 bucks. That came off me.”
In the 18 months since the tech bubble popped, many of his clients either deserted him or filed suit against him.
Brooklyn-born, he has been a salesman since his freshman year at Baruch College and has sold everything from subscriptions to The New York Times to porn videos. Selling stock is what he does. “I’m a good salesman,” he said. “I understand it. And you know, even when you are depressed … you just put on an act. There is a reason that Cats played for so many years. You don’t think those actors ever got sick of it? I know that I’ve got to do the same thing every day.”
Mr. Merrill pays the rent and utility bills for his mother. His wife is on disability and his expenses run to $5,000 a month. Since he’s paid no fixed salary, everything must come from commissions. “Crazy things go through your head,” he said. “Like trying to hurt yourself and go on disability.” How about suicide? He paused, taking some care with his words. “I think about it, like how I would do it—it would probably be pills, not the Verrazano Bridge —but it always leaves my mind. That’s a quitter’s way. It took me a long time to get where I am. Doing that would make me a real loser.”
Mr. Merrill tries not to bring his angst home. But sometimes he will crack. “Your fuse gets short,” he says. “If my wife starts talking to me about some stupid TV show or a recipe, I can go nuts. But I try not to be like my father. When he wasn’t making money, the whole house felt it.”
Ned Merrill is no pump-and-dump boiler-room smoothie looking to make a quick buck. All his clients have his home number, and he’s fielded their late-night calls as they wept over their wiped-out portfolios. Although he wanted to make his and their lives a bit better, he would always tell them: The market is a strange beast; there are no guarantees. “Look, I don’t have one bad mark on my brokerage license, and I never will,” he said. “But every day now, someone is threatening to sue me. And you know what? I still don’t know what’s wrong with losing money …. [I]n this business, you are allowed to lose money.”
Should we worry about Mr. Merrill? Mr. Cass, who speaks to him about once a month, said no. “Ned is not a risk, although his quality of life is certainly suffering,” he said. “But he is married …. It’s all the other guys who are self-medicating through drugs and alcohol—those are the guys I would worry about.”
And as for Mr. Cass, he’s still a customer of Mr. Merrill’s. “Ned got me into this stock at around 6 and said it would go to 20,” he said. “It’s around 1 now. He’s still my broker, though, even though the stock was garbage. You have to take responsibility for your own decisions.”
You may reach Landon Thomas Jr. via email at: lthomas@observer.com.
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