The Buy Side

Turney Duff “The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader’s Tale Of Spectacular Excess”,  Crown Business, 2013, 304 pp.

Well…another book on the depravity of Wall Street prior to the 2008 Crash.  The tale in this instance is told by a former Galleon Group trader Turney Duff.  Anyone who has viewed the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” will feel right at home with this book by Duff as he chronicles some true and disgusting stories of those entrusted with other peoples money.

Duff secured a trainee position at Morgan Stanley in the 1980’s.  After learning the ropes of the Street, he arrived at the Galleon Group hedge-fund management firm run by Raj Rajarantnam (now in jail).  Turney specialized in health-care and was encouraged to socialize with the sell side and solicit as much information as possible from his new broker friends.  He often wondered how those at Galleon made tens of millions of dollars each week in mysterious ways.  Later, he took his talents to Argus Partners and J.L. Berkowitz where he inhaled cocaine in copious amounts, spent copious amounts, etc. 

A book surely not worth reading unless one is a regulator and thinks some of this should be stopped.  Sometimes I amaze myself when I read these books cover-to-cover.

My Notes (only one which catches the gist):

Pg. 185:  You do more damage being tentative than making a wrong choice.  From now on, I’m all in.  If I’m going to be a successful trader, I can’t do it by just trading stocks.  Ih have to be willing to club baby seals, park in handicap spaces, and demolish an orphanage to build a strip club.  On Wall Street, the timid get trampled.  I’m tired of the hoof marks.