Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market - Softcover

Reingold, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060747706 ISBN 13: 9780060747701

Publisher: Harper Business, 2007

Synopsis

Here is the true story of a top Wall Street player's transformation from a straight-arrow believer to a jaded cynic, who reveals how Wall Street's insider game is really played.

Dan Reingold was a top Wall Street analyst for fourteen years and Salomon Smith Barney analyst Jack Grubman's chief competitor in the red-hot sector of telecom. Reingold was part of the "Street" and believed in it.

But in this action-packed, highly personal memoir written with accomplished Fast Company senior writer Jennifer Reingold the author describes how his enthusiasm gave way to disgust as he learned how deeply corrupted Wall Street and much of corporate America had become during the roaring stock market bubble of the 1990s.

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst provides a front-row seat at one of the most dramatic -- and ultimately tragic -- periods in financial history. Reingold recounts his introduction to the world of Wall Street leaks and secret deal-making; his experiences with corporate fraud; and Wall Street's alarming penchant for lavish spending and multimillion-dollar pay packages.

Reingold spars with arch rival Grubman; fends off intense pressures from Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs; and is wooed by Morgan Stanley's CEO, John Mack, and CSFB's über-banker Frank Quattrone.

Reingold describes instances in which confidential deals are whispered days before their official announcement. He recalls the moment he learns that Bernie Ebbers's WorldCom was massively cooking its books. And he is shocked to have been an unwitting catalyst for a series of sexually explicit e-mails that would rock Wall Street; bring Jack Grubman to his knees; and contribute to the stepping aside of Grubman's boss, Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill.

Some of Reingold's stories are outrageous, others hilarious, and many are simply absurd. But, together, they provide a sobering exposé of Wall Street: a jungle of greed and ego, a place brimming with conflicts and inside information, and a business absurdly out of touch with the Main Street it claims to serve.

He shows how government investigators, headlines notwithstanding, never got to the heart of the ethical and legal transgressions of the era. And how they completely overlooked Wall Street's pervasive use of inside information, leaving investors -- even sophisticated professionals -- cheated. The book ends with a series of important policy recommendations to clean up the investing business.

In the tradition of Liar's Poker and Den of Thieves, Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst is a no-holds-barred insider's account that will open the eyes of every investor.

About this title

About the Author:

Dan Reingold was a Managing Director and telecom analyst for fourteen years at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse First Boston. He was ranked number one or number two by Institutional Investor magazine for most of his career. Prior to that he was a financial executive at MCI. He has been profiled in Barron's; frequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and BusinessWeek; and interviewed on TV, including CNBC and Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser. Reingold is currently Project Director for Telecom Finance at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information at Columbia's Graduate School of Business.

Jennifer Reingold is a senior writer at Fast Company magazine. She is the coauthor of Final Accounting: Greed, Ambition, and the Fall of Arthur Andersen and the BusinessWeek Guide to the Best Business Schools. Jennifer is Dan's niece.

From Publishers Weekly:

When retired telecommunications analyst Dan Reingold decided to write an account of what he'd seen while working for powerful Wall Street investment banks, he turned to his niece, a journalist at Fast Company and the author of Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed and the Fall of Arthur Anderson, for help. Together, they've created a solid structure for his recollections of life in the trenches, but because he's one of the good guys, Reingold doesn't have much to confess. Beyond detailing every step in his upward career mobility, Reingold does little but gripe about people like his main competitor, Jack Grubman, who spent years flaunting insider connections with executives who would float him advance info on major corporate deals. (Grubman is currently a defendant in several securities fraud cases.) Reingold does suggest that insider influence is so pervasive in the financial market that investors should avoid individual stocks completely, and he has a number of recommendations for industry-wide reform, but in the end, his story is basically that he worked in the same industry as a bunch of bad eggs. While the personal material is never less than engaging, it doesn't fundamentally alter our understanding of the recent market scandals. (Feb.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0060747706
• ISBN 13: 9780060747701
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384