The relation between fund managers and salespeople was central in the operations of Brokers Inc. This relation followed procedures and rules of practice that I could observe and hear about in interviews outside of the company with fund managers and salespeople working in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. All the professionals I interacted with referred to them as clear professional standards. These rules concerned the temporality of exchanges between fund managers and salespeople, the way in which fee payment was decided and carried out, and the content of what these employees were asked and allowed to exchange.

Fund managers and salespeople had to assert that their relation with thought leadership was developed in order to produce an independent opinion about the value of listed companies. To do so, they had to combine the valuation produced by financial analysts with other information and interpretations. This resulted from a dialogue between fund managers and salespeople. While the content of this dialogue varied from one person to another, it never departed from the framework of financial theory. The application of these procedures was standardized and controlled so that its outcome would indeed be considered the result of a personal opinion, itself a necessary condition for the truth of value. At Brokers Inc., I was able to follow an event where these rules were breached, which allows us to explore what is asserted when the rules are respected.

Direct exchanges between salespeople and fund managers during working hours were usually very short. They were most often done by telephone and rarely happened more than a few times every week or every month. According to most fund managers’ descriptions in interviews and to what I could observe at Acme, in a working day of nearly ten hours, the fund managers’ direct contacts with salespeople rarely exceeded one hour. The rest of the time was used to read financial analyst reports, to decide on transactions with stocks, and to exchange views within the fund management team, among other tasks. At Brokers Inc., salespeople often arrived at the office around 7 a.m. For an hour or two, they read the documents published by Brokers SA’s analysts, the specialized press, and other sources of information, which could vary depending on the subject. They then contacted their regular or potential customers and spent between one and three hours sending short emails and leaving short voice messages on answering machines. The atmosphere at this time in the office was frantic. Salespeople also received phone calls, which they answered quickly. Contacts with clients rarely lasted more than a few minutes. It was not unusual for a salesperson to give exactly the same information several times to different people, even if they tried to change their presentation for each client.

From noon onward, after European stock exchanges closed, contacts with customers occurred less often. Salespeople would quickly leave the office to buy food, which they brought back and ate in front of their computers or at the central table of the big room. In either case, the priority was to remain available in case there was a phone call for them. One of the rules I learned at the beginning of my observations was that no phone should be left ringing more than a few seconds. The rest of the day was devoted to reading financial analyses and to discussing the daily news with colleagues. Salespeople remained available the whole afternoon for fund managers to call them. When they did, it could result in longer conversations. Direct relations between fund managers and salespeople were thus usually intense and short, marked by a “lack of time” and the need to be “concise”—expressions they used in interviews with me and in everyday interactions. Most of the working day of salespeople was thus devoted to preparation for these minutes of exchange, for which fund managers could pay substantial fees.

The relation between fund manager and salesperson developed over the long term according to a chronology that was described to me in very similar terms by employees in Paris and in New York. It started, for the salesperson, when he searched professional listings for contact information about the fund manager. The salesperson then needed to learn about the category of listed companies in which the fund manager specialized. For the first six months, the relation was mainly limited to the regular messages the salesperson left on the fund manager’s answering machine. These were usually thirty-second messages that synthesized information and reasoning about the value of a company or sector. The salesperson would also send the fund manager short emails with similar content. In general, during this initial period, the fund manager did not answer. Salespeople and fund managers in New York and Paris all justified this silence as a way to test the valuation abilities of the salesperson.

After this first phase, if the manager judged the analysis convincing, he answered emails, talked to the salesperson over the phone, and met with him a few times. If the relation moved on, for the first one or two years, the fund manager would pay for the salesperson’s services, but the regularity and the amount of payment could vary considerably. They remained explicitly at the sole discretion of the fund manager, so the salesperson would not know whether the payment would continue or how much he would obtain for his services. Throughout their relation, the fund manager always retained the option to end it at any time and without further explanation or penalty.

At the end of this period, if the relation was to continue, it was considered that the two people had found what employees called a “fit,” a shared “way of thinking.” The fund manager would pay fees more regularly and in more regular amounts. The relation could last for many years and could continue when one or both employees changed employers but continued working in the same profession, so the fees paid by the same fund manager for the services of the same salesperson would be part of the commercial exchange between new companies, as had happened when André and Juliette launched Brokers Inc. Framed by the temporalities and the commercial concerns of their employers, the dialogue between salesperson and fund manager, explicitly aiming to affect the opinion of the latter, could thus continue with a certain degree of autonomy from employers as long as it remained within the financial industry, i.e. as long as the two employees remained officially employed to carry it out.

Over time, salespeople would almost completely stop soliciting new fund managers and focus on a stable clientele that provided them with more or less constant income. As I described in the case of André, this clientele represented an argument when negotiating a salesperson’s place within the hierarchy of the company, a process that Godechot has analyzed in the case of certain types of traders. At the time of my observations, André’s clients paid Brokers Inc. around $6 million. This amount can be compared with the company’s yearly revenue of around $35 million. According to André, most of these fees, and therefore his own bonus, were the result of commercial relations with less than ten clients, ones he had started establishing at the beginning of his career as a salesperson when he arrived in New York at the age of twentyfive. At the time of my observations, fifteen years later, dealing with fund managers took less than two hours of his twelve-hour working day. The other ten hours were mainly devoted to managing employees and the relation with the parent company. In his career as a salesperson, he had worked for four employers. Each move involved the kind of negotiations that led to his position as manager and partner of the New York subsidiary of Brokers SA that I described earlier.

At the time of the creation of Brokers Inc., the revenue of the company came from fees paid by customers who had followed the salespeople—in particular, Juliette and André—to their new company. This possibility for a salesperson to leave an employer and carry with him his customers, on which basis Brokers Inc. was founded, was also a constant threat to the stability of the company. At any time, Brokers Inc.’s salespeople could leave to work for another employer, thus depriving the company of a part of its revenue. A year after my observations Frédéric left Brokers Inc. to become partner in a company created by one of his professional acquaintances. Two years later Frédéric hired two salespeople from Brokers Inc., offering them a higher income and the prospect of a more attractive career. This happened at a time when a major investment bank was in the process of acquiring Brokers Inc. itself. Brokers Inc.’s employees expected that this acquisition would result in the arrival of a new management team and a number of new salespeople, limiting the career prospects of those who were already there.