Early last month Nancy Bush, the lead bank analyst at Prudential Securities, was on a client call when she was summoned back to her office. Why? Bush was about to become the latest victim of a game of musical chairs that had begun in September when Credit Suisse First Boston announced it was going to buy Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.
Not long after that announcement, bank analyst Mike Mayo and his team at CSFB lost their jobs to Susan Roth and the financial group at DLJ. A member of Institutional Investor's All-America Research Team, Mayo, 37, won a lot of attention in 1999 for signaling investors to sell bank stocks - a prescient call, though not for all the right reasons. (Among other things, he thought Y2K would be a big problem for banks; it turned out to be a nonissue.)
Gutsy and arrogant - and a good marketer - Mayo nonetheless lost out to Roth, not long after his wife had given birth to their first child. He found himself hard-pressed to land another job. "I called up anyone and everyone I knew in the business," Mayo says. "I was even willing to give up half of the franchise to just take regionals or do money centers."
He went public with his troubles, cooperating with Fortune magazine on an article detailing his job hunt. The flattering profile concluded that Mayo had been fired by CSFB for turning negative on bank stocks.
Ah, the power of the press. Within two weeks Mayo had landed a new job: Bush's. Prudential had decided to jettison its small investment banking operation and make a big splash as an independent, plain-talking research shop. Which reportedly led Bush to respond, "What am I, chopped liver?"
Bush called her former boss, Larry Cohn at Ryan, Beck & Co., a small brokerage firm based in Livingston, New Jersey, to share the bad news. She'd left Ryan Beck for Prudential a year earlier. Cohn told her to sit tight: He himself was about to make a move, and she would soon be in good shape.
Within a week Cohn had jumped to BBT Partners, a $1.2 billion hedge fund sponsored by the Bass brothers, and Bush had replaced him as Ryan Beck's research director.
"It was all very fortuitous," Cohn said. " We were very happy to get her back."
And how does Mayo feel about getting his job at the expense of another analyst? "In my perfect world I would not have gone to a firm that already had a bank analyst. It's not the way I wanted it to work out."
Bush declined to comment.
