Hero to Zero

CHANCES ARE YOU HAVE never heard of me. I am not famous, nor do I have a list of ultra-highflying achievements to show for my 24-year career in finance. My story may not resonate with you at all. I have no authority, and no qualifications whatsoever to write about the topic of biblical stewardship and generosity — apart from one thing: my personal story. My journey over the last 30 odd years was a struggle with money as the result of a childhood financial trauma which left me feeling poor, cheated, angry and exiled.

My name is Roger Lam, and I am a fourth-generation Christian. My grandfather was a co-founder of a church, and he also started a paint company, a well-known household brand in Hong Kong around the 1930s.

In some ways, we were an archetypal churchgoing family. As far back as I could remember, I had always gone to Sunday School with my parents, and I had always assumed that one day when I grew up I would take over the family business. We lived in a rented two-story house with a large garden in Kowloon Tong, a part of Hong Kong with tree-lined streets and relatively low-rise, stately housing: very different from the better-known parts of Hong Kong, with their crowded streets and neon lights. I had gone to the right kindergarten, the right elementary school and the right high school. I had a little talent in some areas, including oral English skills and tennis — and boy, did I know it. The kindest way to describe me at that time was arrogant.

My late paternal grandfather was possibly an overly generous man. Even though my dad was running the business, he was only given 10 per cent of the shares in the company, as the patriarch wished to spread his favors more widely. My granduncle and his sons collectively owned more shares in the company than my father did — which was where the roots of our troubles lay.

Our family nightmare began in 1985 when I was 13 years old. My granduncle and his sons brought in an outsider (a now deceased high-profile mainland Chinese businessman who had moved to Hong Kong) to do a hostile takeover of the family business that my father ran.

Even though I was very young at the time, I knew what was going on. My dad fought valiantly for more than a year, but he narrowly lost out to the other party.

He ended up having to tender his shares at a heavy discount. He had lost the company he had worked so hard to build up, and in his view, there was nothing left for him to do in Hong Kong. So, he decided to move our entire family to Vancouver in Canada.

At the age of 14, I was painfully aware, to the last penny, of how little money my dad had from the sale of shares, and from that point onwards I developed an insecurity about being provided for. I was an exile who felt that my birthright had been taken from me. I was angry.

Fear Leads to the Dark Side

A WELL-MEANING family friend living in Vancouver suggested that my younger sister and I skip a grade because academic standards were perceived to be higher in Hong Kong than Canada. So even though the English language was not an issue for us, I ended up having one more issue to grapple with — I was a year younger than everyone else in my new environment.

It was difficult to focus. I wanted revenge so badly for what members of my own family had done to me. Success is the best revenge, right? Having no special athletic skills or other talents that would provide an easy alternative route to getting the big bucks, I thought the only way to go was to excel in academic results, and that meant going to a really good private school. However, at the back of my mind was a panicked feeling of worry about scarcity. My dad did not have any consistent income stream, and hence my sister and I ended up with no choice but to go to our local public school.

The first Christmas we spent in Vancouver was awful. I absolutely hated it. It was not so much Christmas that I hated per se, but my inability to take part in this festival of materialism in the way I would have liked. In particular, I hated Boxing Day sale in downtown Vancouver. Everything was on a big discount, and there was so much stuff that I had wanted, but the issue, of course, was MONEY! Some people had it. Though we had done all the right things, I was worried that our family did not have enough to keep up with the Joneses.

In my high school years, I ended up studying really hard to get good grades in order to make a name for myself and to break out from my money worries. I also did a lot of tutoring for my peers to earn extra pocket cash.

But teenagers are teenagers. At the time, I had a very challenging relationship with my mother, so I ended up going to a university as far away from Vancouver as possible. I moved to upstate New York, with the goal being to get as good a GPA in my studies as possible. My personality became very combative. In my view, you were either on my side, or you were The Enemy.

The Lost Decade

GRADUATING FROM COLLEGE in 1993, I must have applied for something like 50 jobs, but I was rejected by 49 of them. Curt, unsympathetic people do not make good interviewees.

I think by the time I got to the final round interview in a couple of opportunities, the interviewers all seemed to have figured out that I had extremely low Emotional Quotient, and that I would not fit into their training programs. The only job offer I got was in Chicago, and at the time I had basically no idea what trading was about, and I certainly had no idea what a hedge fund was.

Yet once I got into place, things moved along smoothly enough. Looking back at those early years of work, I can see that the first 10 years of my career in trading, selling and structuring convertible bonds plus equity derivative products were relatively smooth sailing in terms of getting paid and promoted — which was of utmost importance to me at the time. For example, thanks to a merger between a Swiss bank which I had only recently joined and a UK merchant bank in 1994, I was bumped up to Associate Director at the age of 22.

Two years later, when I was lured by a pay package of double what I was earning together with the prospect of learning different aspects of the equity derivatives business, I moved to another Swiss bank, and...