Morning Coffee: 26-year-old Citi analyst cures burnout with Ayahuasca. Someone at Millennium has lost $100m
Is burning out as a junior banker anything like burning out as an elite sportsperson? Apparently, they’re quite similar, but banking is perhaps a little bit worse as you get less warning of what you’re doing to yourself. That’s what Vitoria Okuyama thinks, anyway, and she ought to know, having done both.
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Okuyama had previously been ranked as high as 118th in the world as a junior tennis player, and started the Citi analyst program in 2022. This was something of a weird year to begin a career, as the pandemic ended and the deals boom started to sputter out, but Vitoria approached it with the same kind of competitive spirit she had brought to tennis, working from 10am to 4am every day.
Unfortunately, this eventually brought the same results as her tennis career had – she grew to hate it, and the process of forcing herself to compete started to bring on panic attacks. Her managers seem to have been quite understanding (and she makes a point of recalling that her Saturdays were always protected), but there’s a limit to what the human body and spirit can stand, and when she found herself bursting into tears in the gym for no reason in October 2024, she realised she needed to do something different.
What she did was a bit more unusual than the normal junior banker reaction to overwork though; she decided to go on an ayahuasca retreat in the Peruvian Amazon. This is not unknown in the tech world, but still pretty unconventional in finance. Probably sensibly, she allowed a bit more time at the end, taking a thirteen-week leave of absence for the one-week retreat. You don’t want to rush that sort of thing.
For anyone else interested in taking psychedelic drugs in the forest as a wind down, the retreat Okuyama embarked upon seemingly involved four ayahuasca sessions interspersed with yoga, sound healing and jungle excursions. Testimonials talk of transformations, "indescribable experiences" and restoration of the soul.
Somewhat predictably, one of the self-discoveries that she made was that she didn’t really want to be a banker. Reading between the lines, one can’t help getting the suspicion that up until that point in her life, Vitoria had spent a lot of time doing things because other people expected them; she had given her youth to tennis, gone to university on a sports scholarship and then applied for banking after being advised by a mentor who knew her coach.
Now she’s apparently learned to question what truly matters, find her real limits and embrace her authentic self (ie, she’s an influencer). This kind of story repeats itself many times every year, although usually without the ayahuasca; investment banking really isn’t a career for everyone, and part of the purpose of the analyst program is to help you find that out.
Elsewhere, a reasonable investment rule of thumb is that it’s always better to make money than lose money. However, there are some times when losing money is not quite as bad as it usually is.
For example, although Sean O’Sullivan and his team at Millennium would presumably prefer not to have taken a loss (estimated as likely to be in the region $100m) on their exposure to First Brands, it might not worry them as much as you’d think. As we know, in career terms it’s never been better to be a “wounded lion”; conditions in the multistrategy hedge fund labour market mean that managers with sudden big losses are more likely to get recruiting calls than pink slips.
But possibly more importantly, the performance figures which will matter over the long term will be driven by who took the worst losses, not who took the first losses. First Brands might be a one-off, but it’s also possible that this is the start of a credit cycle. If the latter is the case, the long term winners will be the people who were quickest to see it coming and take their money off the table. And in past cycles, it’s often turned out that getting a little bit burned at the beginning tends to concentrate the mind and help you take early evasive action. The Millennium team may be hurting this evening, but there’s still plenty of time for them to have the last laugh.
Meanwhile …
Elon Musk has discovered what bankers have known for a while – people will often ignore competitors’ financial offers, they will endure tough workloads and they will shrug off negative publicity, but if you ask them to do all three at once, you’re going to lose even your most loyal lieutenants. (FT)
Jain Capital are in a hurry to add physical commodities trading to their portfolio of strategies, so rather than trying to build a team and set up pipeline agreements and the like, they’ve acquired Anahau Energy to be the seed in a new pod. (Bloomberg)
It’s been quite a while since mere investment bankers could afford the very nicest properties in the Hamptons, but the former residence of the President of Dean Witter International has now sold for $67m. (WSJ)
As London is now trailing Mexico and Oman for IPO volumes, it’s not surprising that some European banks are beginning to wonder what they’re doing there. Danske Bank is shutting down its ECM desk to concentrate on Nordic markets. (Bloomberg)
Has HSBC really managed to improve credit trading with quantum computing? A sceptical view. (Scott Aronson)
The US super-rich are so rich that you can get rich by managing their riches. Family office CIO salaries are now often over $1m, and the total cost of running one can be about 1% of total assets. It’s a good job for someone with the right temperament, although the only way to get promoted is by marriage or adoption. (Bloomberg)
A fun game for a boring afternoon on the desk – think of all the things which could possibly go wrong with installing a sauna as the latest office perk. You might start with one operator’s claim that “People show their vulnerability and the impulse is to support each other . . . If vulnerability is the doorway to intimacy, then the outcome is that teams leave feeling closer”. (FT)
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