The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess Author: Turney Duff | Language: English | ISBN:
B00ALBR6JG | Format: EPUB
The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess Description
New York Times Bestseller
The Buy Side, by former Galleon Group trader Turney Duff, portrays an after-hours Wall Street culture where drugs and sex are rampant and billions in trading commissions flow to those who dangle the most enticements. A remarkable writing debut, filled with indelible moments, The Buy Side shows as no book ever has the rewards – and dizzying temptations – of making a living on the Street.
Growing up in the 1980’s Turney Duff was your average kid from Kennebunk, Maine, eager to expand his horizons. After trying – and failing – to land a job as a journalist, he secured a trainee position at Morgan Stanley and got his first feel for the pecking order that exists in the trading pits. Those on the “buy side,” the traders who make large bets on whether a stock will rise or fall, are the “alphas” and those on the “sell side,” the brokers who handle their business, are eager to please.
How eager to please was brought home stunningly to Turney in 1999 when he arrived at the Galleon Group, a colossal hedge-fund management firm run by secretive founder Raj Rajaratnam. Finally in a position to trade on his own, Turney was encouraged to socialize with the sell side and siphon from his new broker friends as much information as possible. Soon he was not just vacuuming up valuable tips but also being lured into a variety of hedonistic pursuits. Naïve enough to believe he could keep up the lifestyle without paying a price, he managed to keep an eye on his buy-and-sell charts and, meanwhile, pondered the strange goings on at Galleon, where tens of millions were being made each week in sometimes mysterious ways.
At his next positions, at Argus Partners and J.L. Berkowitz, Turney climbed to even higher heights – and, as it turned out, plummeted to even lower depths – as, by day, he solidified his reputation one of the Street’s most powerful healthcare traders, and by night, he blazed a path through the city’s nightclubs, showing off his social genius and voraciously inhaling any drug that would fill the void he felt inside.
A mesmerizingly immersive journey through Wall Street’s first millennial decade, and a poignant self portrait by a young man who surely would have destroyed himself were it not for his decision to walk away from a seven-figure annual income, The Buy Side is one of the best coming-of-age-on-the-Street books ever written.
From the Hardcover edition.- File Size: 1539 KB
- Print Length: 322 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 077043715X
- Publisher: Crown Business (June 4, 2013)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00ALBR6JG
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #12,153 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Business - #16
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Investing - #25
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Biography & History
- #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Business - #16
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Investing - #25
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Biography & History
Duff writes well and I guess he would have done well if he had pursued his original ambition to be a journalist. Instead he took a detour into finance and landed up as a gofer on the trading floor in a well known investment bank. He worked his way up and eventually became a trader in his own right and discovered in himself skills that made him a good one. For example, he did not fall in love with any position he took and was quick to cut losses. He also had sound instincts about the direction the market would head and the steady nerves to bet big on this. So, in glory years, he made a lot of money for his firm and for himself.
As he became successful there were wild parties with alcohol and girls and eventually cocaine, lots of cocaine. He lost control, quit before he was fired, went into rehab, recovered built his career back and became addicted again, went into another rehab and hopefully is now clean and will remain so. But - as he mentions at the end of his book - he has lost his money, wrecked his marriage, shares custody of his daughter and is not sure what the future will being.
Why three stars? I took away one star because he did not reveal as much as I expected he would about the shenanigans of Wall Street Trading. He does mention stuff like how brokers he places orders with routinely 'front run'. That is, they buy stock in the same companies BEFORE they execute his order, his big order drives the price up and they then sell at a profit. This is a practice both illegal and routine. He also has an interesting anecdote about how he was able to get his own back on one such trader by placing a big order with her to be executed at a specific time, waiting for her and her friends to front-run and buy the stock for their accounts, and then canceling his order.
This book at first reminded me an awful lot of Michael Lewis's 1989 book Liar's Poker (later of Moneyball fame). The basic plot starts out the same--bright but not particularly qualified young guy gets a job on Wall Street and is amazed at how much money he can make, and how arrogant and crude the guys around him are (Lewis has a guy known as Big Swinging Dick, while this book has a guy known as Baby Arm, for similar reasons), and gradually comes to accept that he has a right to this sort of wealth, but in the end, sees the error of his ways.
But this latest version of the plot is actually more personal and less about Wall Street as the problem, although in the end, he comes to the conclusion that he can't work there anymore and survive as a human being. But in this case, the book was written more or less as therapy, in an attempt to come clean and stay clean. Turney Duff developed a major cocaine addiction, and destroyed his relationship with the mother of his child along the way. His downfall also happened to coincide with the 2007-2008 meltdown in the financial markets, so he also lost his %$2 million dollar home, which went underwater almost as soon as he (inadvisedly) bought a mansion 2 hours away from where he worked.
However, this is not just "guy from the hood finds religion and stops using." This is advertised as "A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess," and so there is plenty of ammunition here for anyone who questions why a guy on Wall Street should be paid a million dollars a year or more. Duff majored in journalism, and he came into the business of trading on Wall Street with no background and no special skills.
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