Inside the Mind of Wall Street

Marathon’s capital cycle approach leads to a natural wariness of investment bankers. After all, Wall Street is in the business of supplying capital to hot areas of the stock market and generating fees from dubious financial engineering. Both these activities have always struck us as inimical to the interests of long-term shareholders. From the perspective of a bemused buy-side onlooker, it was clear to us that the typical Wall Street banker during the early years of the new millennium had little interest in protecting the interests of clients. Rather, the game of banking had become all about fee generation, regardless of the consequences. A whole chapter in Marathon’s previous publication, CapitalAccount (2005), was devoted to investment bank antics.1