Jul 012013
The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader’s Tale of Spectacular Excess
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 exp
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AMAZING memoir,
This book was absolutely awesome – it was everything a memoir should be. It was brutally honest, extremely well written and engaging but not over the top, and didn’t come across as overly self focused.
The thing that I think I loved the most was that it was a really unique perspective that most people wouldn’t have a lot of access to. I don’t know people that make 2 million dollar bonuses, so it was fascinating based on that alone. I also don’t know much about the world of finances or Wall Street, so that was also fascinating (and disturbing).
I also really appreciated the chronology. You become lured into his drug addiction just like he was. He believed he could quit and as you’re reading it, you do too. It’s written so that you become attached to the people involved and experience his life as he’s experiencing it. I loved the honesty. He gives you enough detail to make it real but not so much that you feel like you’re looking at him naked – it’s a balance that’s difficult to achieve and he did it flawlessly.
The writing is perfect. Sometimes the story carries the writing and sometimes the writing carries the story, but this had both. He nailed it.
I would say the only disappointment I had was (spoiler alert) that he didn’t end up being able to reconcile with his daughter’s mom. But that’s not really the book so much as the story and I’m a sucker for happy endings. He handles it well though, and you can totally see why the relationship fell apart.
Overall an amazing book that I’ll recommend to everyone I know. Well worth the read.
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|A Personal Memoir, with some insight into a major social issue,
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. His uncle put him in touch with someone, his interview had nothing to do with what he knew about economics or finance, and yet he got the job and basically just lucked into vast amounts of money. His particular job is to call brokers and place buy and sell orders. The brokers also make a lot of money every time he trades, so he is just one layer of a layer-cake of people making money off of money. Where is the real wealth? Oh, that is made in factories and farms and mines, not on Wall Street. But the guy who works 80 hours a week in a factory is lucky to make $40,000, while these jokers make 10, 20, or 50 times that.
The amount of wining and dining, golf trips, limousines, trips on private jets, and more (much more!) is pretty stunning. It is not at all hard to see how a young guy could get totally caught up in this lifestyle and find it hard to imagine any other line of work. Turney Duff presents himself as a fun guy, a guy who wasn’t particularly cutthroat, who wanted everyone to like him. He was far from the worst of the worst.
The story starts off kind of slow–I’m not really very interested in his relationship with his father or shoveling snow in Kennebunk, Maine, and it doesn’t seem very relevant to where the story eventually goes. But you can’t help enjoying the ride as the perks get larger and larger, the fun never stops, and then the descent into hell begins. At the end, it became a real page-turner as the real people around him, like Raj Rajaratnam, actually got perp-walked to prison by the FBI, and he thinks the feds are stalking him as well.
Michael Lewis later said that to his horror, his expose in Liar’s Poker was taken by the next generation of young Turks as a how-to guide on how to get rich on Wall Street. Hopefully, this memoir will teach the important lesson that the cost of selling your soul includes drug addiction and lying bleeding on the street and sleeping under your desk.
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|Well Written Wall Street Confessional,
A very well written memoir of filthy behavior. At last Mr. Duff’s Journalism degree has been put to good use. The scandal at Galleon Group, one of the most successful hedge funds during its heyday certainly helped sell this story, but the book is much more than Mr. Duff’s 2 year stint there as a health care trader. The story picks up steam just as soon as the booze, cocaine and hookers surface, and it never seems to let up. It’s a comfy place to be on the buy side as everyone falls over themselves to vie for Mr. Duffy’s attention and business, and that’s where Mr. Duffy’s troubles with cocaine began. Living the single life with a fat wallet on Wall Street, Mr. Duffy was finally hitched with a daughter soon to follow. Unfortunately for his family, his drug, alcohol and pornography habits never abated, and his professional life headed for disarray as well. The Buy Side is a quick and entertaining read.
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