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City of London finance genius set to buy into Rangers

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JM1872

JM1872 3,735

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What amazes me is they are only getting bids of £4.5m fo Hooper hahahahaha should have sold him in the summer in cunts.

Anyway, on topic, this could be interesting. As long as he wears his tie in a suitable fashion, and it's straight, and he can gees the sash then let him carry on.

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the goal machine

the goal machine 7,807

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WORKING on the noisy, frenetic trading desk at Goldman Sachs’s London offices on Fleet Street earlier this decade, Kieran Prior and John Yeatts, two bright and ambitious twentysomethings from very different worlds, became close friends.

Prior, a gregarious, wise-cracking proprietary trader from the gritty outer suburbs of Manchester, took a liking to the soft-spoken Yeatts, a first-year financial analyst and native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Although Prior, then 23, was just a year older than Yeatts when they met in 2002, he enjoyed dispensing practical advice, teasing the American about his Saturday night dates and taking him out for pints of beer after work.

Yeatts returned the favour. When traders ordered lunch delivered to their desks, Yeatts cut up Prior’s food and fed him one small bite at a time. When Prior wanted a coffee, Yeatts would hunt down a straw, pop it into a lukewarm latte and carefully hold it close so that Prior could take a sip.

If Prior accidentally knocked research materials off his desk, Yeatts gathered them up and replaced them, because Prior - who was born with a rare condition akin to cerebral palsy that affects his motor skills and impairs his speech - cannot get out of his electrically powered wheelchair unaided, and has never been able to walk.

Indeed, Prior struggles with even the most basic motor skills. When startled by any sudden movement or loud noise at close range, he reacts abruptly, muscles contracting sharply, limbs flying out.

Stress and fatigue, the daily burdens of any trader, exacerbate Prior’s symptoms, making it hard to control his hands and feet - and even harder for him to talk: enunciating requires sustained concentration on his part.

Prior grows embarrassed and deeply apologetic when he accidentally kicks a colleague, but the most serious damage he has ever done is to himself: the force of his reflexes is so great that he sometimes dislocates his shoulders. Yet despite these physical limitations, Prior is thriving on Goldman’s proprietary trading desk - arguably the most demanding and competitive testing ground in finance - winning the admiration of colleagues while gaining experience, confidence and responsibility.

It’s not easy running a book of any size for the high-powered trading machine that supplies much of the earnings of Wall Street’s most profitable firm. That Prior is able to do so with such physical limitations is nothing short of extraordinary.

Gary Williams, the former head of European equity trading who hired Prior nearly eight years ago, has enormous respect for his determination.

“He is an exceptionally smart, perceptive guy who has purposefully risen to - and overcome - so many challenges,” said Williams.

“The noise and hurly-burly of the trading floor make the physicality of trading more difficult for someone in Kieran’s position, but the challenge actually appeals to him.”

Intellectually, Prior, now 29, has few limits. Since joining Goldman as a financial analyst in the equity division in 2000, Prior - whose IQ score of 238 on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale puts him in the top 1% of the world’s population - has risen from performing basic research analysis and trading Euro Stoxx futures to running a $50m (£25m) value-based book of European mid and large-cap equities and derivatives.

That climb has been all the more difficult because Prior couldn’t learn like any other junior trader. His bosses at Goldman quickly understood that although he could use a phone headset and Bloomberg terminal, Prior would never have the manual dexterity to handle high-volume client order flow.

So rather than have him spend several years filling orders as most young traders do, they matched him with a small group of more senior proprietary traders in risk arbitrage. Working alongside them, Prior learnt by example, helping out with research and booking trades. Finally, a few years ago, he earned the chance to run his own book.

As frustrated as he is by his physical limitations, Prior is keenly aware that his disability can have a profound - and sometimes unexpected – effect on his fellow traders. In May of last year he received an e-mail from Yeatts, who had left Goldman two years earlier and returned to America to apply to medical school.

In his e-mail Yeatts said that he had written extensively about his relationship with Prior in his applications. “Our time together at Goldman was the essential inspiration and catalyst for my decision to go into medicine,” Yeatts wrote to his friend.

“In my small attempts at helping you, you helped me more than I could imagine. I wouldn’t be doing this without you.

“Those were rare moments,” said Yeatts, now 28, newly married and attending medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Helping Kieran really reminded me of what I was missing – and of the values my parents had instilled in me.

“If anyone asked me why I wanted to become a doctor, I just explained about my relationship with Kieran.”

Sitting in his sparsely furnished, dimly lit ground-floor apartment – a utilitarian corporate flat equipped for the disabled that he shares with his live-in carer, Andrew Cringle – Prior falls silent while rereading Yeatts’s e-mail. “I couldn’t respond to it,” he said. “I didn’t even know how. I just felt really grateful, because getting that letter was amazing.

“I don’t have very many memorable trading stories yet, because I am still not senior enough to be put on big positions, but the letter made me realise that I had actually touched an individual’s soul.”

Despite his growing ability to make money, Prior doesn’t take human connections for granted. Hanging out in a crowd at a pub called the Evangelist on a balmy Friday evening, watching his friends flirt with pretty girls, he is careful to ask only those male friends he knows won’t be embarrassed to help him sip his beer.

At work he calls Cringle and leaves the floor when he needs to eat lunch. Prior credits Goldman with being extremely generous and supportive, but his isolation is palpable.

Eighteen months ago Prior decided to reach out. Using his own history as a means of highlighting the challenges faced by disabled children and teenagers, he designed a charitable fund with the help of his friend Mark Borland, a former head of international bonds at Morley Fund Management.

The London-based Priority Trust aims to raise £600,000 this year to provide customised wheelchairs and mobility equipment for young people. The trust has the support of Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who in the 1989 film My Left Foot portrayed the life of writer Christy Brown, who was born with cerebral palsy.

Prior hopes to give away at least half the amount raised this year - and wants to amass even more in future - but doing so means taking a risk and telling his own story for the first time.

Few boys growing up in the 1980s in Salford could conceive of working for an investment bank; mostly they dreamt of playing for Manchester United or becoming policemen or firemen. Prior, though an ardent United fan like all his neighbourhood friends, was forced to be more pragmatic.

He depended on others to help him with his wheelchair or pick him up and carry him wherever he needed to go. Often, after his mother brought him home from his special-needs primary school, his elder brother, John, and neighbourhood friends would propel him up the road to the field where they played football.

His father, Terry, recalls that the boys once came home so excited after a game that nobody noticed Kieran was missing.

A full half hour passed, he said, before someone asked, “Where’s Kieran?” and the boys realised they had left him on the sidelines.

“I set off up the road to fetch Kieran and there he was sitting in the middle of the field in his chair,” said Terry Prior. “It was getting dark , but he wasn’t crying. I asked him why he hadn’t called out to anyone and he said he knew someone would come for him eventually.”

Such tenacity and sang-froid have long characterised Prior’s approach to life. He credits his drive to his early, visceral fear of dying: in his final year of primary school, he said, four of his disabled classmates died suddenly, including twin boys who had been his friends. His parents assured him he was not at risk - his classmates had all had degenerative muscular dystrophy; Prior’s condition most closely resembles secondary nongenetic dystonia, characterised by sustained main muscle-group contractions - but he did not believe them. Worried that he would never grow up, he worked hard to be tougher and smarter - as if by excelling he could escape his classmates’ fate.

Prior was eight when he got his first powered wheelchair thanks to a local charity. “I remember it being staggeringly liberating,” he said. “The ability to move about the house on my own was unbelievable. It was like climbing Everest. And going down to the garden gate, being able to look out - amazing.”

His father remembers it well, too. “That chair opened up a new world to him,” he said. “He could finally join in, instead of being left behind.”

Prior certainly was not left behind in the classroom. The headmaster at his primary school told Prior’s parents to push hard to get the boy a place in a good, mainstream comprehensive rather than a school for the disabled because he had such tremendous intellectual capacity.

Prior’s father had to fight Salford’s local authority to make it happen, but he got his son into Kaskenmoor School in Oldham, where the teenager thrived. Prior first hit on the idea of becoming a trader around the age of 12 or 13. He was inspired, he said, by a growing awareness of how much his parents were sacrificing for his care.

His father owned a butcher’s shop and later took a job as a baggage handler at Manchester airport. His mother, Patricia, gave up her position as a bookkeeper to look after him from birth.

Prior realised that if he were ever going to fund his own care and live independently he would need to make a lot of money as soon as he left home. The surest way to do that, he thought, would be to go into finance.

After graduating in economics from Manchester University, Prior’s determination to become a trader never wavered - and he only wanted to work for the best. “It was all or nothing for me,” he said.

“I could have stayed in Manchester because it was easier to live at home, but I thought, basically, let’s go for it. I knew I could pretty much do anything I wanted intellectually and I thought, to use a football metaphor, why not go out and try to play for Real Madrid?”

To Prior that meant Goldman Sachs, and in his final year at Manchester he met a junior analyst from the bank at a university function and revealed his ambitions. The analyst was so impressed that she passed along his contact details to her boss, European equity chief Williams. Intrigued, he drove up to Manchester one afternoon to meet Prior for a preliminary interview.

“I expected Kieran to be very quantitative, reserved and geeky, given the supercomputer between his ears, but he was just the opposite,” said Williams. “He was really outgoing.”

Williams invited Prior to London for an interview with other senior partners. The former equity chief - who is now retired and races cars - said Goldman had always been a bank that took in young analysts, trained them in its investment culture and assigned older traders to mentor them until they gained their footing in the markets.

And though he was a little surprised by Prior’s single-minded drive to become a proprietary trader he admired it.

“Trading is intellectual, but it has a combative element,” he said. “I think the macho part of that - the idea of working on a mental battlefield - appealed to Kieran as much as the need for pure brainpower.

“He also has a great memory and can think laterally; he recognises patterns and makes connections that other people fail to see.”

Prior joined Goldman just four days after he graduated from university on July 6, 2000. Early on, he caught the attention of John Thornton, Goldman’s then-president, as the latter was walking across the trading floor. Thornton stopped for a brief chat - and was wowed.

“I couldn’t help but be impressed,” said Thornton, who is now a professor and director of global leadership at Tsinghua University in Beijing but still counts himself as one of Prior’s mentors.

“First of all, Kieran’s sheer, raw talent is impressive, and when you add to that the determination he shows getting through the day in a place like Goldman Sachs, which is so demanding, it is just breath-taking.”

Although his bosses never worried about Prior hitting the wrong key or typing a string of zeros - all trades require layers of execution confirmation before they clear - they did have to devise an unusual, alternative method to educate him.

As a consequence, his training as a proprietary trader has taken longer than it might have otherwise, because - after leaving the risk arbitrage group - he has had to work through a succession of asset classes in turn: futures, Euro Stoxx, equities and equity derivatives.

Prior has the latitude to invest in almost any business sector, but recently narrowed his focus to just 20 companies - primarily mid and large-cap financial, industrial and energy companies - because of the extreme volatility in the markets. “I joined Goldman in a bear market,” he said, “but these markets are the most difficult I’ve ever seen, so I’m just using this period of volatility to learn as much as I can.”

The stresses of trading add to a daily challenge that would exceed most people’s capabilities. Because he cannot walk or stand unaided, Prior has to have live-in assistance. Cringle, a burly, bearded South African who has been looking after Prior for the past five-and-a-half years, gets him out of bed, dresses him for work, and buckles him into his wheelchair each morning before Prior rolls down Ludgate Hill to Goldman’s offices.

At work, Prior likes to do as much as he can on his own. His stubborn pride has sometimes prevented him from asking for help when he has needed it most. In his first year as an analyst at Goldman, his wheelchair broke down and he missed several days of work because he was stranded in bed while it was being repaired.

When he returned to the trading floor, Thornton came over to find out whether he had been ill and Prior told him about his chair. Thornton wanted to know whether he had replaced it and Prior said he had not. In response to the inevitable “Why not?” he confessed that he didn’t think he could afford to buy a new one, because it cost £9,000 and he had only just started in his job.

“I think John was somewhat horrified, because he insisted on giving me the money for a new chair,” said Prior.

Thornton’s kind gesture literally set Prior in motion again. Having been the recipient of unexpected generosity those seven years ago, Prior is now in a position to give back - and wants to make as broad an impact as possible.

Nobody could be a more passionate advocate for the right of disabled children and teenagers to have the means to move as freely and independently as they would like. From Prior’s perspective, financial profits are finite and easily quantified, but the return on hope is limitless.

Pretty inspirational.

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