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The Buy Side

A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A former Galleon Group trader 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.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 1, 2013
      Looking for a Hollywood-worthy account of Wall Street with lots of juicy details about the high life? Duff, a former financial trader who climbed the ranks at several major firms, provides a fascinating glimpse into the trader’s life as he narrates his journey from smalltown boyhood in Kennebunk, Maine, to hitting the jackpot in Manhattan, to succumbing to the poisons of success. After earning his stripes at Morgan Stanley, he joins the Galleon Group and gets his first tastes of the privileged trader’s lifestyle. Jumping ship to Argus Partners, he finds he has “arrived”: he wears suits from Barneys, lives in a $9,300-per-month apartment, and indulges in escorts, alcohol, and drugs. As his star rises, so does his partying, until cocaine and booze take control and he begins his fall from grace. Despite the money that continues to roll in; a committed, loving relationship; and the impending birth of his daughter, Duff’s downward spiral cannot be stopped. His fast-paced tale will absorb readers, taking them along for a wild ride until they land in a comfortable spot squarely in the middle. Agent: Lisa Leshne, the Leshne Agency.

    • Kirkus

      May 1, 2013
      Former Wall Street party boy tells his cautionary rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Finally reaching the proverbial palace of wisdom after years of greed and high-stakes drugs-and-money excess, former big-spending trading whiz and recovering addict Duff turns in a heavyweight confessional about the perils of a life spent chasing the almighty dollar. From sleepy Kennebunk, Maine, Duff moved to New York in 1994 after graduating with a journalism degree. He soon found work as a sales assistant for the formidable Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley. Little did he know he was embarking on a death-defying roller-coaster ride that would see him go from making $30,000 per year as an assistant to pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary (plus hundreds of thousands more in bonuses) in the late-1990s tech-boom. But by 2008, Duff's fortune was dwindling along with the market. Before he knew it, he was stuck with a mortgage he couldn't pay and was in rehab for cocaine abuse, before finally burning all of his Wall Street bridges and beginning his life again. In fact, he exited this slimy lifestyle just before the life consumed him. Duff lucidly depicts the hedonistic emptiness of the Wall Street culture, as well as the callous, cutthroat environment that makes most careers on the Street very brief. But even though the author's brutal honesty about his increasingly chaotic personal life is commendable, it's really more his vivid portrait of the everyday inner workings of life at a hedge fund that fascinates. Duff's down-to-earth conversational writing style demystifies the daily business of what a stock trader actually does and just how a hedge fund can pull so many billions of dollars seemingly out of thin air. A fast-paced memoir of the easy-money hypercapitalist dream-turned-nightmare.

      COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      May 1, 2013
      With the twists and turns of a suspense novel, this autobiographical account of the rise and fall of a hedge fund trader exposes the risks and liabilities of a career on Wall Street during one of the most turbulent decades of the financial industry. Duff's 15-year career parallels the peaks and valleys of the stock market, from the boom of the 1990s to the tumultuous decline in the early 2000s. With unabashed honesty, he tells how he went from an entry-level position in Morgan Stanley in 1993 to successful trader on the buy side before his excessive partying and downward spiral into drugs ended his career and he had the courage to walk away for good. He exposes the occupational hazards of his high-pressure trading jobs, the lure of power and money when million-dollar trades were commonplace, insider alliances were useful, and collusion was a part of the business. Fast-paced and gritty, this is a fascinating and convincing portrayal of one trader's challenges in a tough environment and his ultimate redemption.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

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