I recently bought a magic deck of cards. I was wandering around a shopping mall in a foreign city and out of curiosity walked into a magic shop. I walked out with something called a Tapered Deck.
The Tapered Deck is exactly what it sounds like, a deck in which the cards are tapered. The cards are all slightly wider at the bottom and narrower at the top.
The difference is so slight though, that on picking up the cards you wouldn't really notice it.
Turn one card 180 degrees and reinsert it in the deck though and it is clear that the cards aren't symmetrical. The one that is rotated sticks out at its wide end just enough that it's obvious if you're looking for it, but not enough that an unsuspecting audience member is unlikely to notice.
Once you understand the simple properties of the Tapered Deck, it doesn't take much to imagine the magic tricks that could be performed with it. The magician can fan out the cards, ask an audience member to pick one, look at it and insert it back into the deck. All the magician has to do is rotate the deck while the audience member is looking at the card so that the card is reinserted in the opposite direction to the rest of the deck. The magician can then amaze everyone by finding the correct card by magic.
It took someone pretty clever to come up with the Tapered Deck, but it's very simple to use once you see how it works. I can do this trick with virtually no practice and if you were watching you would not be able to work out what I did, unless you had read this column.
This is of course a nice metaphor for the finance industry. All the fancy products, the leveraged finance structures, even the capital-raising strategies all took some very clever folks to dream them up, but once that was done, practically anyone could sell them to their clients. What's important is the performance.