I will be strictly honest about the area I major in. Finance world is much like the world of marijuana users. The whole thing is like a culture. You are in the culture of finance, but which subculture does a practitioner belong to is subject to his or her self-awareness and interest. Becker mentioned that identification of a drug user from a non drug user can be explained as the result of some traits which motivate a person to engage in that activity. This applies to finance people too. From which specific area a person is in finance, we can identify what kind of person he wants to be and can be. I would say that an investment banker probably can never become a trader. It’s probably also true that a trader would never want to be an investment banker either. The reason is that the culture in these two business areas is majorly different. An investment banker always wants to overvalue what he is selling to the market, but a trader is always cautious about what he is buying and he is always trying to be conservative about an asset’s value. This behavior signifies how money is made in these two areas. It’s much like the opposition of buyers’s behavior and sellers’ behavior. They are in conflict with each other.
More importantly, a trader generally wants to make quick money, take a position in the morning and close the position in the afternoon. Win or lose, they don’t want to hold for too long. But on the other hand, investment bankers, their projects are usually long, because they are basically creating a new product for the market. A probably inappropriate metaphor is that traders are probably like supermarkets, always buying low and selling high. Investment bankers, on the other hand, they create new products for market. So, from a larger perspective, this displays a person’s personality. A trader is aggressive in terms of taking loss and profits, while investment bankers, they tend to be conservative and careful making and adding features to a new stock.
Your post made me realize that our perception of "culture" and "subculture" are up to the discretion of those who are having the conversation. To, say, a member of CBS, they would view business in general as the culture and finance as the subculture. But to those in Carlson, this analogy makes perfect sense because we are more familiar with the workings of the majors.
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