Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle - Softcover

Rolfe, John; Troob, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446676950 ISBN 13: 9780446676953

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2001

Synopsis

They Hit "The Street." Forget what you've read, forget what you've heard, forget what you've been taught. Monkey Business pulls off Wall Street's suspenders and gives the reader the inside skinny on real life at an investment bank, where the promised land is always one more twenty-hour workday and another lap dance away. "The Street" Hit Back. Fresh out of Wharton and Harvard business schools, John Rolfe and Peter Troob ran willingly into the open arms of investment bank giant Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette. They had signed on as foot soldiers in a white-collar army of overworked and frustrated lemmings furiously trying to spin straw into gold. They escaped with the remnants of their sanity-and, ultimately, this book. Uncensored, unsanitized, and uncut, it captures the chaotic essence of the Wall Street carnival and the outlandish personalities that make it all hum...and it will become the smartest, most entertaining investment you'll make this year.

About this title

About the Author:

John Rolfe graduated from Virginia Tech, The University of Florida, and Wharton Business School. At Wharton, he was the editor of The Wharton Vulgarian. Following his sentence with DLJ, he spent several years working at a private investment fund. In 2001, he co-founded an equity-oriented money management firm, and today manages the firm from a top secret location deep in Vermont. He lives with his wife and two children, and is currently attempting to learn how to produce maple syrup.

Peter Troob graduated from Duke University and Harvard Business School. At Harvard, he was the humor editor for Harbus. After a gross error in judgment caused him to return to the investment banking world at DLJ, he left for the greener pastures of distressed debt investing at a private investment fund. In 2002 he co-founded a debt-oriented money management firm, which he continues to manage today. He lives with his wife and two children outside of New York City, where he can often be seen limping around the neighborhood and complaining about his bad knees.

Review:

"...funniest read since Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker...Dave Barry couldn't have written a more schizophrenic tale..." -- Industry Standard, 4/17/00

The Net Economy is infatuated with boy wonders. Fawning magazine stories report the musings of obscure research analysts like PaineWebber's Walter Piecyk, 28, who managed to boost Qualcomm's market cap by $25 billion in one day last December. And Vanity Fair chronicles the harrowing road shows of baby-faced CEOs.

But there's a dark side to the story: the legions of hungry, young investment bankers who make it all happen behind the scenes. Wall Street's young turks attach themselves to anything and everything that generates fees. In the late 1980s it was junk bonds and mortgage-backed securities. In the greedy 1990s and onward it's Internet stocks.

Now thanks to two recent defectors from Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette, we can peek behind the curtains of these money-making machines. Their book, Monkey Business, is the funniest read since Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker, and it should give pause to anyone who comes in close contact with this rare species.

Two young MBA hopefuls, John Rolfe and Peter Troob, got sucked into Wall Street right out of Wharton and Harvard, respectively, soaked up the local color and left to tell all a short while later. The scenes are straight out of movies like Wall Street or The Boiler Room: The young associates nurse their supersize egos while their bosses try to crush them; they curse profusely and live large on four hours of sleep a night; they subsidize the strip clubs of Manhattan before Mayor Giuliani took the perk away from Wall Street.

But what do they really do for $200,000 a year? "It took our mothers six months to realize that we weren't stockbrokers, working the phones to sell crappy public offerings to unsuspecting investors," they write. "It took us another six months after that to realize that we were, in fact, selling crappy public offerings to investors." The only difference was that these two associates were shoveling the smelly deals to institutional investors, who then passed the bucket on.

Dave Barry couldn't have written a more schizophrenic tale. In a freewheeling narrative that alternates between the two men, Monkey Business lays out in exquisite detail how pitch books are developed (collaborative yet futile chaos dictated by hierarchy); how an investment bank arrives at a company's valuation (mostly guesswork driven by the desire to prove a company's march toward world domination); how to read a prospectus that an army of lawyers, bankers, accountants and managers have fought over in mind-numbing "drafting sessions" (skip everything except the financial statements). Then there's the story of a fruitless "due-diligence" trip for the junk-bond offering of an unnamed multinational wireless company, a wild goose chase over 12,000 miles through seven countries that yields little substance.

A year into their banking careers, both authors decide to chuck it all and get a life, leaving behind what they call a jungle full of commandeering baboons, dung beetles and busy monkeys. These days they work for a hedge fund, go home at 8 p.m. and toy with a Web site (www.streetmonkey.com) that pokes fun at anything Wall Street, from the relaxed dress code at Goldman Sachs to the demise of the Tiger Management hedge fund. The duo isn't working on a pitch book to take themselves public - yet. -- From The Industry Standard

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0446676950
• ISBN 13: 9780446676953
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288