Morning Coffee: How to land your dream banking job and blow it in 24 hours. Unusual new banker risk-taking

Investment banks like to tout internal mobility, but the prospect of moving from a support function in the back office to a revenue generating role in the front office is a rare event these days.

So, what happens when you do manage to make the move and it implodes on your first day? Wall Street Oasis has a tale of an anonymous back office worker who "networked like hell" and managed to land an job in the investment baking division, but then blew it within hours. This is currently supposedly the big story running around NYC.

His problem was that he left a trail of bad blood behind him. By striving towards a front office role, he annoyed his manager in the back office and it came back to bite. After getting settled in, he changed his email signature to show his new-found front office status: "Then he goes on to send an email to the boss who had fired him and who they were on bad terms with. The email was completely blank in the body of the email and had no subject. Just a blank message to his old boss," says the poster on WSO.

If this seems like a way of sticking it to the man, bear in mind that it didn't work out. By Friday, the call from HR came. "He tries every excuse on the book and even says it was an accident that he emailed the old boss. An MD not from his group is in the office and sees right through him and says 'we know exactly what you were trying to do. Your service is no longer needed at this firm. Security will escort you out of the building.'" Never burn your bridges.

Separately, a strange thing is happening in the City of London - bankers are going all out buying lottery tickets. Ticket sales for the huge Euromillions lottery, which has now swelled to £121m ($155m), have grown twice as fast in the City of London and Canary Wharf than in the rest of the UK, according to the Financial Times. Suffice to say, the chance of winning are slim - around one in 100m to be precise - but the FT has made an unpleasant comparison point. You are 14m times more like to get fired than win the lottery.

Meanwhile: 

The cost of buying a home in London is so high, many young bankers would prefer to work elsewhere (Financial News)

How asset managers are preparing for Brexit: “You won’t see mass migration, but you will see slippage [of jobs moving away from the UK], as well as unseen losses — jobs that would have gone to London and now go somewhere else.” (Financial Times)

20 banks and fund managers including BlackRock, Citi, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley are being wooed to choose France over another EU financial centre after Brexit. Macron is a "game-changer" (Financial Times)

François Villeroy de Galhau, the governor of the French central bank: "We are having discrete but numerous and serious contacts” with banks in the UK about relocations. (Independent)

Nomura's international business is jokingly referred to as the "bastard child" (Financial News)

Machine learning is the real game-changing in finance (Economist)

Hedge funds are getting around really being quants by just saying they're quants and attracting investors (WSJ)

Google avoids revealing gender pay gap by saying data is too hard to get (Guardian)

The best firms for women (Sunday Times)

Dangers of being a grammar bore: World Bank's chief economist stripped of management duties for focusing too much on the language used in research (Bloomberg)

Jeremy Corbyn has his own video game (Politico)

Blazer and jeans as your smart casual choice? You've given up on life (Financial Times)

Contact: pclarke@efinancialcareers.com

Image: Getty Images