Simon Meadows is known for striking terror into CSFB traders at the bank's Canary Wharf headquarters in London. But this particular Friday morning he is relaxed, smiling and talkative. Perhaps it's because he is about to go scuba diving in Grenada. Or perhaps it's because he can look back on a good year, having added Russia, Lebanon, Turkey, Slovenia, Croatia and Romania to his list of sovereign clients.
"I just love tickin' 'em off," he enthuses. "I don't know whether it's because I got an A for geography at school but I love doing deals for sovereigns."
For the past five years the ebullient Meadows has been joint-head of CSFB's highly successful London debt capital market team with John Walsh. The partnership thrives on their different approaches - Walsh is easy-going, Meadows a ranter. But despite the contrasts in style they have had, according to Walsh, just two brief arguments.
"I'm always looking to explore the upside," says Walsh. "Meadows is wonderfully realistic. He has an ability to see the end result from day one and can manage capital commitment. He can be miserable, intense but he is very unemotional about risk - sees it very clearly. And although he can be very forceful, everyone appreciates him because he is 100% genuine, a total straight-up character."
Meadows's verbal exuberance masks a level-headed trading outlook. "He's a classic Salomon value trader," says former colleague Ian Hannam, now a director at Robert Fleming. "He's a salesman's trader, an investment banker's trader. When he commits capital he's fair to both sides. He's a marathon player - very solid, consistent and reliable."
Now Walsh is off to New York to become co-head of global capital markets (with Tim O'Hara) while Meadows remains in London as global head of syndicate. Both insist, however, that the teamwork will continue.
Born in 1962, Simon Meadows had lived in 21 locations by the time he reached 21. "I didn't grow up anywhere," he says. His father was a captain in the navy; his step-father worked for the ministry of defence. He was educated at St Joseph's, Ipswich, a Catholic boarding school in eastern England run by the De La Salle order.
After St. Joseph's, as an impecunious, staunchly left-wing student at the London School of Economics, he would wangle his way into the BBC World Service canteen across the road for a subsidized lunch. He took part in student demonstrations before graduating in international trade and development.
Before his interview at Salomon Brothers, Meadows could find only two mentions of the bank in the Financial Times during the previous year. "It shows you how the world's changed," he says. "There were 11 people applying then. Two years later there were 300."
"I got turned down for some pretty dreadful jobs," he recalls. "But I clicked with these guys, especially David Deloucia, who was head of trading [and who later went on to Goldman Sachs and is now chief operating officer of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette]. You could tell it was a fun and interesting place to work." Meadows was the only one of his intake who wasn't either an MBA or from Oxford or Cambridge. Three years before London's Big Bang, he was probably also the only 21-year-old receiving an investment banking training that included a spell in New York.
He started by trading Eurobonds - Eurosterling for four months, before moving on to Eurodollars. Over the next year or two he traded all the Eurodollar books. Trained by John Frith (now at Paribas), Meadows learnt that the key was to be organized and to use all the information to hand. "Who is going to be a buyer and who is going to be a seller? Do I think it's cheap or do I think it's rich? What I was taught is you have to have that opinion about every bond. Don't just reflect what the market does."
But Meadows's eye for value in the Euromarket didn't entirely carry over into his judgement about personal purchases. After his first bonus, he rewarded himself by buying a very expensive - £500 ($850) but none-too-elegant bag. "It looked plastic, like something you put your gym kit in," recalls a former colleague. "We used to kick it around the office."
Meadows spent 1985 at Salomon in London before moving to New York in November 1986 to market Eurobonds. Six weeks later he was brought back to London after several of those above him left. He effectively ran the Eurodollar desk until 1988, when he moved to run the syndicate desk under Sheldon Prentice, during which time he did the first global bond for the World Bank.
In 1992 Chris Carter, who'd moved from Salomon to CSFB, recruited Meadows to be co-head of CSFB's London syndicate desk with John Walsh, who had been there for two years. That same year they did the complex $500 million subordinated bond that HSBC used to finance the acquisition of Midland Bank and two years later the ground-breaking seven-year Deutschmark deal for Argentina. "The market thought it would be a disaster," says Meadows, "But we ended up increasing it and doing another seven-year for them, then a 15-year and a 20-year."
Aside from earning enough money to keep him in sharp suits and fast cars - he owns a Porsche 911 Turbo and a brace of BMWs - it is doing a variety of deals that keeps Meadows excited about the business. But for all his success, he remains a worrier. "I worry about positions, deals we've done, deals we've not done. But if you don't care, you're not going to be any good at this job."Philip Eade