Sammy Sellside: Markets gloom puts clients on permanent voicemail

I hate it when my clients go on maternity leave.

As a specialist salesman for a big European investment bank I can't just abandon the client, I have to find out who is covering for her and then call them instead.

Typically analysts on the buyside are covered by graduate trainees when they go on

maternity leave or even on holiday, so I end up talking to some youth

green behind the ears who can't remember that Elementis was ever called

Harrison & Crosfield, and thinks that Cable & Wireless has always traded at under a

pound.

Now one of my favourite clients, Betty Buyside, has disappeared to have a

baby and rumour has it that she's not planning to return for ages.

Sure enough, some spotty youth is covering for her and I will have to call

him almost every day and resist the urge to patronise him.

What the client wants, the client gets, and if the way to get ranked by the client is to

spoon-feed their graduate trainees, so be it.

Betty had a little boy last week and I dutifully sent flowers, claimed for on expenses of course.

She was in the Portland Hospital at the same time at Claudia Schiffer, so I

did consider taking them round there personally.

Betty works for an insurance company as an analyst in their investment

management department, so she gets big company benefits including very

generous maternity leave on 90% of her pay. So I guess there's not much

incentive to return.

As a bloke, I can't ever get paid to stay at home and do nothing on most of my pay, except perhaps when I'm on gardening leave, and fat chance of that at the moment.

One of my colleagues in the Stockholm office is on - wait for this - a year's paternity leave, during which time he will get three-quarters of his pay, largely subsidised by the state! I

should move to Sweden.

Apparently you don't even have to get married to claim paternity leave, as

long as you are shacked up together and the baby actually exists.

Daydreaming of Sweden is one way of passing the time in the worst bear market since the war. Those of my clients who are not on maternity leave seem to have gone to terminal voicemail.

Even the ones who I can usually speak to when I call have stopped answering the telephone. It gets to the point when you wonder if they have been shown the door, so long is it

since you were able to find proof positive that they are still employed.

I don't really like to ask if someone has been fired, but goodness knows it seems

to happen often enough.

As well as calling Betty, and buyside analysts at several other clients,

on my sectors, I also have client account responsibility for Betty's

employer, Immense Insurance plc.

Thus it is my job to chivvy up all our analysts and salesman and make sure than when Immense Insurance does its quarterly broker reviews we score as highly as possible.

Of course it's hard to give a fund management client a complete service across all sectors when our research department is shrinking daily. Three more analysts were fired this week.

It is keyhole surgery rather than a bloodbath. But it still very inconvenient

and then sometimes it is ages before they are replaced, if at all.

Not that the clients want to hear about stocks and shares these days. When

I do get to speak to them they mostly want to know how their competitors are

doing and to talk about what they might do if they lose their jobs.

There's so much consolidation going on in the fund management industry; the

latest rumour is that Newton and Threadneedle are going to get together.

You can imagine that my clients in those companies are much more interested in

talking about the job market than the stock market. It's enough to make me

want to go on paternity leave.

You can contact Sammy at: sammysellside@efinancialcareers.com