- Three young professionals in their 30s who worked on Wall Street saw their fast-paced, high-paying careers come to an abrupt end as the stock market decline led to widespread layoffs in the financial industry. - Amy Kong, a director at Merrill Lynch, Chris Stavros, a top-rated oil and gas analyst, and Scott Cunningham, a trader at Lehman Brothers, all lost their jobs despite years of success. - The prolonged market slump has left many unemployed for longer than past downturns, forcing people to leave Wall Street careers and industries altogether in search of new opportunities.

1. Wall Street's bust knocks fast-track careers off rails ; Layoffs: Many young professionals'
frenetic ride to the top, fueled by a 20-year boom, comes to an unexpected end during a
three-year decline.
[FINAL Edition]
The Sun - Baltimore, Md.
Author: Marego Athans
Date: Jan 21, 2003
Start Page: 1.A
Section: TELEGRAPH
Text Word Count: 2687
Document Text
NEW YORK - They had grown accustomed to the life, rising in the dark, arriving at work before 7 a.m., spending their days in
frenetic trading rooms and management offices in the glow of a 20- year Wall Street boom.
Amy Kong had traveled to 30 countries on business by the time she was 30.
Chris Stavros had been ranked the industry's No. 2 oil and gas analyst by The Wall Street Journal for his 2001 stock picks.
Scott Cunningham had just moved his young family into its dream house in Long Island, a neighborhood of homes valued at
$500,000 to $1 million.
For their generation - all three are in their 30s - a high- intensity career on Wall Street was the path that seemed to guarantee a
comfortable future.
Never did they imagine that the ride would end so suddenly. All three lost their jobs.
Three consecutive years of stock market losses have led to heavy layoffs in the financial-services industry and its sharpest
percentage drop in employment since a Middle East oil crisis ravaged the markets from 1972 to 1974.
Since employment peaked in April 2001 at 786,100 jobs, the industry has lost 77,800 positions, a decline of nearly 10 percent,
according to preliminary November figures from the Securities Industry Association.
In many cases, those forced out of work were senior-level employees, investment bankers, even star strategists and economists
from Wall Street's largest firms.
Unlike the downturns of 1990 and 1987, when the market rebounded relatively quickly, this protracted slump has left many people
unemployed for months, even a year or more.
"This is the first time that people will not only be leaving a major brand-name firm and going to a regional firm ... but in many cases,
people will be leaving Wall Street and never be working on the Street again," said Terry Ebert, managing director of the Ayers
Group, a recruiting, consulting and outplacement service in New York.
Surprised, not dejected
When Amy Kong was laid off in November as a director in marketing research after 8 1/2 years at Merrill Lynch, she immediately
began contacting friends and colleagues. There were only two people she couldn't tell: her parents.
"They'd worry about me more than I worry about myself," Kong, 32, said of her parents, Chinese immigrants - her father a retired
cook, her mother a housewife - who never learned English.
"They're not corporate people. They don't understand severance or outplacement. If Dad lost his job, that was it. He'd always say,
`Merrill Lynch is a good company; don't do anything stupid.' They don't understand that in these rounds of mass layoffs, it's not the

2. employees who are jeopardizing their jobs."
Kong isn't someone you'd expect to be looking for work. An energetic woman who grew up in Sunnyside, in the Queens borough of
New York City, she earned a degree in architecture before turning to Wall Street, landing a job in Merrill's technology training
program in 1994.
Starting then, her rise into the executive ranks of the nation's largest brokerage firm was rapid. Along the way, she traveled to 30
countries, from Brazil to South Africa to the United Arab Emirates to Taiwan, training overseas brokers in the use of technology to
develop their businesses. At one point, she managed a staff of 10.
She says she has at least 40 business suits in the closet of her one-bedroom Brooklyn Heights co-op, which she bought 4 1/2 years
ago largely because it was close to work.
"I love corporate America. I want to be there," she said, chuckling.
How much of her identity is wrapped up in Wall Street? In some ways, she said, the hustle and bustle does create the person.
"When I got the job at Merrill eight years ago, walking through the World Trade Center plaza, past the fountain, looking up at the
towers, it was of a feeling of `I made it.'"
It was almost prophetic that a week before Kong was let go, she and her mother were chatting over coffee at Starbucks when her
mother said she had been reading about Merrill's problems in the Chinese newspapers.
"How secure do you feel your job is?" her mother asked. "I said I don't think any jobs are secure," Kong recalled. Everybody should
be looking."
The morning of Nov. 19, Kong was called in to speak with a representative for her manager, who was out of town, and handed a
severance package that - along with her savings - would support her for about a year.
She was surprised, but not dejected, she said. "I'm the kind of person who says if you can really change something, move on."
When she was working, Kong rose at 5:30 a.m. "If there was sunlight, I knew I was late," she said.
She'd set her BlackBerry electronic device to go off at 6 a.m., then answer e-mails from people in various time zones on the seven-
minute train ride to work, or while she was walking. By 6:45 a.m., she was at her desk on the 35th floor of the World Financial
Center.
Now, the sun is up and the birds are chirping when she awakes. She still hits the computer first, trading e-mails or taking Web
classes in job hunting offered by Drake Beam Morin Inc., the company that Merrill Lynch hired to help its laid-off employees find
work.
One or two days a week, she puts in a full 9-to-5 day at Drake Beam Morin, which is set up to replicate a corporate office, with
computers, cubicles, an array of newspapers, long-distance phones, high-speed Internet access and fax machines.
These days, there is also more time to volunteer for charitable organizations. During the holidays, she wrapped gifts for Gilda's
Club, a cancer organization, and handed out bags of toys for poor children at a church near her home.
"This woman gave me a big hug," she said. "I thought, you know, this is what it's all about, not how much money I made. It's making
a small impact on someone's life."
Shared trepidation
Chris Stavros, 39, who was laid off a year ago this month, thought he'd be well entrenched in a new firm by now.
The former oil and gas analyst at UBS Warburg had made a steady climb through several Wall Street firms over the previous

3. decade to become a senior-level researcher ranked No. 2 in June last year for his 2001 stock picks.
He was living well in Manhattan, in an apartment with a spectacular view of the Empire State Building, dining at New York's toniest
restaurants when he felt like it. Stavros had been an oil analyst at Paine Webber when UBS Warburg took it over in 2000. Now
there were two oil analysts, and they shared the job.
But by early last year, with the market in deep malaise, he was the one picked to go.
"Throughout this, I'm trying to be optimistic and a glass-is- half-full type of person, but realizing that a lot of this is out of my control,"
he said.
As he searches for a job, he senses the trepidation shared by people who are still employed, but know they could be next: "They're
probably more cautious in the sharing of information [about job prospects] as the value of the information goes up. They might be
fearing they have to use it themselves. It's strange."
Juggling `a lot of plates'
The first time Scott Cunningham stepped onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, he knew he was meant to be a trader.
"It was the activity level," said the 36-year-old Georgetown University graduate, who spent high school and college summers
working at Long Island restaurants.
"It's a lot like the restaurant business, a lot like being a bartender. You have a row of customers, and you have to remember what
they all have going on - drinks, conversation. You have to be able to juggle a lot of plates."
At Lehman Brothers, he was earning $350,000 a year when the market peaked in 2000.
He and his wife, Mary Ellen, a former burn center nurse, picked out their dream home in Rockville Centre, Long Island, a Cape Cod
with a white picket fence. Mary Ellen was able to stay home with their three girls, Katie, 6, Bridgett, 3, and Grace, 1.
"It's only in the last couple of years that we've been able to enjoy his success," said Mary Ellen, emerging from the kitchen with
cupcakes she had made for a school party. "When we got married, we had nothing. Nothing."
In those days, when she heard of $300,000-plus incomes, she was amazed. "I couldn't believe people actually made that much
money," she exclaimed.
Then, on the morning of Nov. 14, Cunningham was called to an office off the trading room. He knew immediately. He told the
managers they were making a big mistake, then gathered his Rolodex and desk photos in a box and took off, calling everyone he
knew on the way home.
Except his parents. They were on vacation, and he didn't want to spoil it. When his mother called that afternoon and asked why he
was home, he told her he had chores to do. The next day, his father read it in the paper: Lehman had laid off 500 employees, 4
percent of its staff.
Suddenly, instead of rising at 5:15 a.m. to be on the trading floor before 7, he was rising after the sun, maybe taking a five- mile run
and settling in at his computer in a rustic upstairs study just past the bedroom inhabited by Katie and her two mice, four birds and
snake.
A recent afternoon found him there, wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap, checking the Bloomberg wire for job listings and
stock quotes.
Bridgett, just home from preschool, came bounding in to kiss her dad, followed by the family's boxer, CJ.
There are perks from being home these past two months. Cunningham bonded with his 1-year-old daughter Grace, who likes it

4. when her father puts her down for naps and plays hide and seek.
"Before, my time in the house was crazy time - eat, bath, bed," he said. "Now it's like do-what-you-want time," he said.
The toughest part "is going from doing 15 to 20 things at once to one to two," said Cunningham, who has a laid-back demeanor but
the quick, almost rushed manner of speaking that is customary for traders.
"I'm used to the pace. It's hard to lose that," he said. "Before Wall Street, I had a regular desk job, and it drove me nuts."
But the trading floor pressure was nothing like this: three young children, a hefty mortgage, an $800-a-month health insurance bill.
The couple talked about Mary Ellen's going back to work, a prospect that worried her.
Their luck turned last week, when Cunningham accepted a job as a sales trader, market maker and proprietary trader at the start-up
firm FTN Financial. It's the kind of job he was looking for, offering more customer contact.
The firm is much smaller than Lehman Brothers - his branch has 10 people - and, because it's a start-up, the compensation in the
beginning may be as much as 50 percent less than what he was making at the market peak.
"I'm going in with the assumption that I'm good enough to make it more," he said.
The `boutique' route
Amid the setbacks, opportunity is emerging in the form of small "boutique" shops. Michael Vanin, 48, never thought he'd
go that route when he lost his job as a top branch manager with Prudential Securities, a division of Prudential Financial
Inc. in Boston in November 2001.
But that's just where he ended up after job-hunting in the Boston area for 10 months: the nontraditional, start-up outfit
Mercury Wealth Management Inc., which plans to open 20 branches from Boston to Baltimore.
Mercury's idea is to coach midlevel brokers to attract clients looking for an asset manager - someone with a vested
interest in seeing their portfolio appreciate - rather than a broker who earns a commission on each trade.
For Vanin, the new venture - of which he is a principal -comes with a steep earning curve as well as a learning curve; he
expects an initial pay level in the low five figures, far below the high six figures he earned at Prudential.
Since 1996, Vanin had been a key manager supervising - at the peak - 80 brokers in palatial offices on Boston's Federal
Street, with a marble staircase, dark wood paneling and a grand view of the Charles River.
He and his wife, Kris, had built a four-bedroom Colonial house on one acre in the suburb of Needham, enrolled their
daughters, ages 15 and 10, in private schools, joined an Episcopal church and various boards, volunteered for charities
and helped at the schools.
When the layoffs hit him Nov. 13, 2001, Vanin decided to limit his job search to the Boston area to avoid uprooting their
daughters. But the market sank deeper into its funk.
Meanwhile, there were the $40,000-a-year tuition payments, the $900-a-month health insurance premiums and a savings
portfolio losing value with each slip of the Dow.
So the Vanins put themselves on an austerity plan, forgoing vacations, cleaning their own house, cutting their own grass,
canceling magazine subscriptions.
In August, Kris - who had been a stay-at-home mom for 10 years- went back to work as an intensive-care nurse. Lacking
seniority, she landed the night shift, 7 p.m. to 7:30 a.m., three nights a week, and now sleeps during the day.

5. "I think the emotional toll has been hardest on her," Vanin said.
For him, there was the embarrassment.
In the beginning, he didn't tell anyone what happened except his parents and in-laws. He'd drive his daughters to school,
come home, close the garage door so that no one would see the car and avoid answering the phone.
"You become very isolated," he said.
At one point, Vanin and his wife couldn't even discuss the job situation, even though they knew they had to, because it
made them too angry and sad.
He sought the counsel of his pastor and sometimes found himself in church during the day.
"You were the top of your game, one of the best, you work hard at it and have a few of the trappings of success," he said.
"When that's taken away, where a family depends on your ability to make a living, you question the whole formula - how
am I going to be a productive member of society?"
He was used to a life of picking up the phone, calling the chairman or the president of the company, and getting a direct
answer.
"Suddenly I was walking the dog, picking up the girls from school and going grocery shopping. Not that there's anything
wrong with that, but it was a very different experience."
He remembers going to bed night after night thinking: "I don't have anywhere to go tomorrow."
"There are times when I thought `I don't think I can get through another day,'" he said. But that didn't last long.
"Every night when we sit down for dinner I have two little faces looking at me, and they are depending on me. I have to
move forward. That's the biggest motivation you can ever have."
Credit: SUN NATIONAL STAFF
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