For most of a decade I worked for San Francisco’s Montgomery Securities (which became Banc of America Securities after a purchase). I was a securities analyst and then an institutional salesman. We called ourselves investment bankers, but no one ever asked for a definition of that title. I joined in 1986, staggered through the 1987 crash, then rode the market upward until my retirement in late 1994, just in time to miss the Great Market Uptick. My boss once told me that could have been a great salesman if I only had “more larceny in my heart.” My assignment, he more than once intoned, was “to turn my clients’ assets into my personal net worth.”
