They know she’s a decent trader because everyone knows she’s a decent trader. Although decent is, she thinks, an understatement. And actually a most obnoxious qualifier. They know because there are leaderboards, giant flat-screens at either end of the floor, that rank every single employee on the trading team. Gil, or someone senior, designed an algorithm that accounts for the size of each trader’s portfolio, the annualized returns and the absolute growth and then spits out a ranking, a number next to each trader’s name. At first Jess was turned off by it—it seemed needlessly cutthroat—but as
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