This is a fantastic example to explain to non bankers our life spent in front of multiple screens.

Why `Penis' Will Make This a Most-Read Story: Michael Lewis
2007-01-11 00:08 (New York)


   Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) -- ``New Jersey Man Clips Penis in
Vacuum Mishap.''
   As recently as 1998, this headline on the Bloomberg was
born to attract a crowd on Wall Street. That one sentence was
equipped to win any battle of financial news stories, and it
did. On the day the story broke, May 15, there was no shortage
of harder news: mass riots in Indonesia, a spike in U.S.
inflation, Sandy Weill's announcement that he would like to buy
Fidelity.
   None of that news interested Bloomberg readers so much as
the tale of the New Jersey man sucked into his own vacuum
cleaner.
   And so, if you had asked me which of the thousands of news
stories that flashed across Bloomberg screens in 2006 would be
among the most read, I would have given you a list of the
bizarre and the macabre. The story of the woman whose farting
grounded a commercial airliner, for instance, or the news that
cocktails at the Kentucky Derby were going for $1,000 a pop.
   What these most-read story lists capture is the sort of
news readers are drawn to when they happen to be sitting in
front of Bloomberg terminals -- which is to say, when they are
at work. And when Wall Street people are talking on two phones
at once as they glance at three screens, what they are generally
looking for is something to jar them out of their state of
abstraction. Something, anything, to cause them to stir in their
seats and remind them, however briefly, of their five senses.

                         Most Read

   But times have changed, apparently, and the change is
reflected in this recent list of the most-read news items of the
year. Of the 30, only an airplane crashing into a Manhattan
building, the foiling of a U.K. terrorist plot to blow up
commercial airlines, the suicide of a former National Football
League player, and the news that there was a video to be seen of
a Brazilian MTV hostess fornicating on a beach distracted Wall
Street from money.
   But even that suggests a false breadth of attention, as the
man with the MTV hostess was a Merrill Lynch banker, and both
the plane crash and the bomb plot obviously implicated Wall
Street lives. Of the 30 Bloomberg stories most read in 2006
there was really just one in no way connected to Wall Street,
the news that former Philadelphia Eagles safety Andre Waters had
shot himself.
   Shareholders in Wall Street firms -- where Bloomberg
readers tend to work -- might see this as a step in the right
direction. It's good to know that the time once spent discussing
the pros and cons of inserting one's penis into a vacuum cleaner
is now spent dwelling on financial news.

                          Look Closer

   Upon closer inspection, however, it wasn't the useful
financial news that captured Wall Street's attention. You can
count on one hand the stories that might move markets, or affect
business: three items about the Federal Reserve and a pair of
stories about giant corporate acquisitions.
   News that implicated Wall Street jobs and paychecks, on the
other hand, drew huge crowds: Goldman Sachs's bonuses, Morgan
Stanley's bonuses, Credit Suisse's trading losses, commodity
traders' losses, commodity traders' booming pay -- the list goes
on.
   In a year filled with breaking news on the war on terror,
wild fluctuations in energy prices, the collapse of American
support for the war in Iraq, the demise of Tony Blair and the
Republican Party, and changes at the helms of the Federal
Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department, a story of more interest
to Bloomberg readers than any of these was the report that
HSBC's New York branch might get rid of as many as 20 bond
traders.
   In this list there is both mystery and pattern.

                     Follow the Paycheck

   The pattern -- and the thread is fine, but so brightly
colored that it shouldn't be ignored -- is an overwhelming
interest in a particular kind of financial news story: stories
that implicate, in one way or another, what Wall Street people
might be paid at the end of the year. The Bloomberg reporter who
wanted to be most-read might best spend his or her time digging
not into the market forces affecting Wall Street's business but
those affecting Wall Street's employees.
   The mystery is Amaranth. Amaranth was far and away the
topic of greatest interest to Wall Street. And it was obviously
big news -- the largest trading loss in financial history, or at
any rate that anyone can recall.
   But Amaranth's collapse was a surprisingly antiseptic
event. The characters were small and the themes dull. The story
offered no obvious lesson, apart from the obvious one that no
one should gamble away $6 billion on the direction of natural-
gas prices.
   The event didn't ripple through the financial world in the
same way, say, as the collapse in 1998 of Long-Term Capital
Management. And for all these reasons it didn't engage the
general reader. Amaranth proved that it's possible for a trader
to blow $6 billion of other people's money and still bore the
average American.

                        Amaranth Appeal

   This didn't bore Bloomberg customers. Just about any story
written about Amaranth attracted Bloomberg readership, and five
of them made Bloomberg's list of the top 30.
   The angle that appealed most wasn't Amaranth's effect on
markets or investors. Nor even, really, the inner workings of
the Amaranth mind. For instance, a riveting article, mostly
ignored, explained how natural-gas speculators such as
Amaranth's Brian Hunter may have been relying on the (wildly
inaccurate) 2006 hurricane forecasts generated by a 26-year-old
rookie at Colorado State University's Department of Atmospheric
Science.
   That story was of relatively little interest to Wall Street
readers.
   What Wall Street readers wanted from their Amaranth stories
was the answer to three simple questions: Who won, who lost and,
above all, how much? The interest in Amaranth, in short, seems
to have been the first cousin to the interest in Goldman Sachs's
bonus pool. After all, the $6 billion lost by Amaranth didn't
simply vanish. Someone on Wall Street was on the other side of
those trades. Goldman's bonus pool came from somewhere.