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Black Cards and Wall Street with Tim Sykes

Things have been a little bland around here recently, which is my fault so please stop pointing fingers, so I wanted to spice it up a little.  Who better to do it than the man on Wall Street who has an opinion on everything, Tim Sykes.  If you know Tim, he doesn’t need an introduction, if you don’t know him - check out TimothySykes.com. Tim was featured in S1 of Mojo’s ‘Wall Street Warriors”, and is now trying to create past penny stock success by trading his way from $12,415 to $1.65M, you can follow his trades at his website. To do Tim justice, I didn’t edit his responses.

So Tim, what are your thoughts on the black card?

I think it’s got some great benefits and features and it’s definitely bragworthy, but I doubt it’s right for anybody who doesn’t own their own biz, is worth less than a few mil or for any cheap Jews. In fact, I think the Torah specifically states in Cheapjewonomy 3:23-7:11: “Thou shalt not spend $2,500/year on something so superficial”

In order to be in the Who’s Who on Wall Street, is a black card a requirement?  If not, is there another card that people are starting to flaunt now?

No, in order to be WWoWS you just have to be a prick and willing to lie, cheat and steal—depending on the situation/client. A black card is just one of the many possible trophies you receive for being such a shitty human being/above-average financier.

The card now being flaunted around is the BOB card, or Banking On Bankruptcy card—as in “I’m banking from betting that your firm is going bankrupt.” It’s getting more popular by the day, especially among the hedge fund crowd.

Does it seem like everyone on Wall Street has one, or is still a symbol of having “arrived”?

Many of the true higher ups—and even moreso the wanna-appear-to-be-higher-ups-but-really-have-little-talent-importance-or-intelligence-just-family-money-connections-or-coke-problems-usually-all-three—definitely have one. Throw a bag of blow at anyone dining at Per Se, Masa or Daniel on any given night and chances are you’ll hit a black cardmember, not to mention you’d get a good laugh from watching the mad scramble for the bag itself as if it were Barry Bonds’ 756^th home run ball. (If anyone takes me up on that suggestion, please put the video on Youtube, it’s got viral written all over it!)

Do your friends use the additional perks like booking jets, helicopters and travel benefits, or is it mainly for show?

Oh, I’ve known a few people who have it and they each use it differently—one likes it strictly for its perks, another impresses clients with it, another impresses girls and at least two of the above use it rather regularly to cut coke.

Mind you I only bring up coke so much because it’s really everywhere in finance and it’s amazing/sad that nobody seems to want to talk about it honestly. I have no problem chatting about it as my business model is all about brutal honesty and I suck at drugs—even Nyquil fucks me up!

What is the largest purchase, with the card, you have heard of someone making?

One of my fund manager acquaintances booked a week and a half stay at the Bellagio Villas, which at $6,000/night, came to $60,000 or so (see the pics here) and that was before all his costly “perks”.

I was invited to go, but there were three problems a.) I don’t do coke so I would’ve been the oddball of the group b.) I was in the middle of a big stock trade so I didn’t want any distractions and c.) I had just come down with a nasty sinus infection

Story of my life, my Jewishness, stock trading and lack of a drug addiction combined to prevent me from having fun at someone else’s expense. Life could be worse.

Have you heard of any outlandish stories involving black cards?  Maybe including strippers or coke?

Damnit—I didn’t want this interview to just be about coke! Oh well—like I said in my WallStrip interview, I live my life by these two rules: “No coke, no hookers” so while I hear a ton of stories, I’ve never participated and I never will.

Here’s a lesson for you and your readers—and I speak from experience: making a ton of money is damn hard/fun/satisfying, but the best part about it is the journey/quest/fight, not the rewards.

The people I know who are into coke and strippers are incredibly unhappy with their lives/relationships so they act out and try to find fulfillment with these rebellious/adrenaline-based pursuits. They are neither healthy nor satisfied because their heads are all mixed up.

For too long, I spent too much of my hard earned money on superficial stuff—mostly just trying to impress girls—and it’s funny/ironic that it took a $300,000 loss for me to realize that my life had little meaning and I wasn’t very happy. You might even go so far as to say I subconsciously wanted to lose money because before that one bad investment—and it really was just one illiquid investment, the rumors of my “celebrity status” interfering with my trading are total BS—I was batting a thousand and it didn’t make sense that I still wasn’t satisfied.

Making money just for the sake of money or what it can buy you is no way to live—I was fortunate enough to learn that at a relatively young age. This is why the magazine Trader Monthly aka Traitor Monthly is rumored to be going under (see my blog post about how their sick twisted editor-in-chief Randall Lane bragged about their readers making $400k/year and spending all of it!)

With your new site, the book, and TimTV you got to be getting close to receiving one right?

I am getting rather close considering my income has been doubling each month lately thanks to my 70% return over the past few months even as the markets have been getting killed, thus spiking interest in my blog, real-time trade alerts, book An American Hedge Fund and my no BS DVD PennyStocking.

But all I really need to be happy is my sushi (Yasuda, Seki & Gari), which comes in under $50k/year. Travel, rent and other cuisines are important too, but add that all in and I’m still under $150k, so I’m gonna have to find other things on which to spend my money as my business is all internet-based and outsourced aka cheap/efficient as hell!

The day you get yours, what’s the first way you’re going to flaunt it?  Knowing you, it must be something over-the-top?

The thing with me is that for whatever reason I don’t get along with luxury items. I had several little goodies and toys—BMW 745Li, lots of fancy sporting equipment, decked out hot tub, decked out air hockey table, limited Tag watch, the list goes on and on—and something bad has always happened with each of them. Don’t ask.

So, I’ve learned my lesson and now limit my buying to fine wining and dining, travel and other experience-related purchases. That always seems to work out well—as I find myself Forrest Gumping my way through life—and I enjoy it immensely!

But I do have a master plan for one particular expense that will be rather over-the-top, something that would make me unique among all these finance freaks—not that I’m not already, after all, I do have a soul—but this would solidify my uniqueness. And it’d actually work quite nicely with the Black Card, so when that happens, you and your readers will be the first to know!

Does having a black card go hand in hand with having “FU money” (As you so famously discussed on Wall Street Warriors)?

No, because as I discussed above, lots of wannabes have gotten their hands on this card, sullying its reputation forever, even if it was unavoidable because there are so many soulless bastards/daddy’s boys/cokeheads/wastes-of-space Upper East Siders/etc. out there.

AMEX should come out with a Soul Card that wouldn’t just be based on how much money you have/make, but would also require psychological and achievement-based testing to make sure you’re not a useless person, you contribute to society/help others, your priorities are in order aka you actually deserve recognition/perks/rewards.

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