Lee Geiger

Money won is twice as sweet as money earned.

Eddie Felson (Paul Newman), The Color of Money (1986)

The calendar says it’s time to dial up some March Madness, college basketball’s annual Darwinian dance. It’s also when people of high intellect and sound discipline believe it’s a good idea to wager the mortgage on the fate of Rhode Island vs. Creighton (f.y.i., Creighton is currently favored by 1).

Here on Wall Street, where games of chance are as integral to one’s portfolio as blue chip stocks and muni bonds, the opening rounds of the NCAA Men’s basketball tourney draw more interest than Kate Upton chairing a meeting of the Federal Reserve. Filling out your bracket and watching your favored teams survive and advance can generate more financial goosebumps than taking profits from your short position in Yahoo. Conversely, there’s the corrosive pit eating away at your stomach after not one but TWO of your final four powerhouse picks (don’t let me down, Duke and North Carolina,) spit the bit to scrappy squads filled with future YMCA pick-ups from the Ohio Valley Conference.

Two decades ago, during the Internet-bubble era, I witnessed Wall Street trading desks parlay enough money on the athletic prowess of 18 to 20-year-olds to fund the gross national product of Sweden. Nationwide conference calls and hastily called meetings took place over every shift in the Seton Hall-Georgia point spread, an arbitrage opportunity viewed as critical to one’s net worth as the outcome of Pfizer’s takedown of Warner-Lambert. My shock at the fortunes wagered were followed by the awe of a trader’s hoops intelligence, who, despite having just committed millions of dollars of the firm’s capital on buying a slug of Hewlett Packard, knew more about the three-point shooting efficiency of Wichita State than the margin compression dynamics of the PC printer market. And, when you consider the stakes, why should he?

The advent of electronic trading has done more to reinvent the financial industry than turn the New York Stock Exchange into a CNBC soundstage. It’s also neutered Wall Street’s wild west speculative culture. Gone are the days of neurotic million dollar traders gunslinging capital and screaming at strung-out floor brokers, replaced over time by Zippy the Monkey droids only slightly more engaged than their vacuous robotic algorithms. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. I’m the oldest droid in my office.

That doesn’t mean $100 NCAA winner-take-all pools have completely disappeared from the Wall Street landscape, or the ten-buck lunch gamble on the outcome of Louisville vs. Jacksonville State (last I checked, the line was Louisville -20…and I’m getting hungry). But the dangerous Wall Street practice of wagering more than you can afford on the bounce of a ball based on the insipid size of one’s wallet (and by association, ego) seems to have gone the way of the paper ticket. And in my book, there is certainly nothing wrong with that.