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Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst : A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market (Hardcover)
by Daniel Reingold, Jennifer Reingold
| Category:
Wall Street, Stock market, Telecom sector, M & A |
| Market price: ¥ 268.00
MSL price:
¥ 248.00
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Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
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 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A compelling and entertaining account of the boom and bust in telecom as seen by a top analyst, this book is good to gain insight into how the Wall Street works. |
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Author: Daniel Reingold, Jennifer Reingold
Publisher: Collins
Pub. in: February, 2006
ISBN: 0060747692
Pages: 368
Measurements: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00100
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0060747695
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- Awards & Credential -
Being a a prominent Wall Street analyst for 14 years, Reingold's book is a valuable source of information of the telecom boom and scandals in the 90s. |
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- MSL Picks -
Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst is THE inside and insider's story on the events that slapped Wall Street executives with billions in fines for their criminal acts. Author Dan Reingold notes, "While the world finally saw justice served in the story of WorldCom, the jury is still out on my view, on the telecommunications industry, which burned so brightly and sucked in so many people before it turned into the deepest of black holes.
Moreover, the jury is still out on the responsibility of the Wall Streeters who aided and abetted the rise of these companies and then simply got out of the way when they collapsed, at most paying only a few modest fines. And, it's still out on the insider game that I was a key part of, a game that the average investor - and even many of the professionals - can never win."
Complete with a cast of characters (109 to be exact), notes, photos and a glossary, Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst delivers in style, form and fact. On a timeline from the 1980s to the present, including hundreds of conversations with key players, this book is a one-stop shopping spree on the telecommunications superhighway, a "once-sleepy industry suddenly looking like it was Barbarians at the Gate all over again, with breathtaking hostile offer takeovers fueled by a stock market that was making anything possible." The stakes were mind-boggling: long distance, fiber optics, local carriers, wireless providers, and the Internet. "In four short years, a tiny upstart company, run by a former gym teacher, had catapulted itself into the same league as old Ma Bell. WorldCom symbolized how the telecommunications industry had transformed itself, and we, the analysts were the nexus of it all."
Anticipation is the thread in this book. We read each detail, while knowing where it will all end. Yet we still read, as Reingold has a writing style that captures our attention. It's like watching the movie Memento, which starts at the end and ends at the beginning. And what a cast of characters! Execs from MCI, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse First Boston, Solomon Brothers, AT&T, Qwest, WorldCom, and many, many more. The Prologue starts the reader at the Bernie Ebbers trial, where the verdict is read. From then on, the story reads like a well-written tale of espionage.
In August 2000, SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt identified situations "whereby officials of public companies provide information to Wall Street insiders prior to making the information available to the general public." This is Selective Disclosure, the precursor to the October 2000 Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure). Janet Reno and many federal officials have been heard from since these regulations were filed. Insider trading was business as usual on Wall Street.
In his afterword, "Back to the Future, Some Policy Prescriptions," Reingold shares with us his views on where we go from here. His visions are written from the viewpoint of a seasoned analyst, with responsibility both to the industry and to its investors. Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst certainly got my attention!
(From quoting a American reader)
Target readers:
Investment banking professionals, investment consultants, MBAs, finance majors, anyone else interested in Wall Street, stock market and financial industry.
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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.
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From Publisher
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.
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Chapter One
The Plunge
1989-1991
Ed picked me up at my house in a taxi. My home, at the time, was nothing super fancy, but Paula and I had put a lot of sweat into it and were quite proud of it.
Ed took one look at the house and almost started laughing. "You ought to come to Wall Street and hit the big time," he said.
July 14, 1989
"This Is the Street Where They Fool People."
That's what I was thinking as I stepped off the early morning express train from Scarsdale and stood on Madison Avenue, blinking nervously in the bright sunlight. As I gazed up at the rows of tall buildings and tried to avoid colliding with the natives, I felt the tiniest sense of relief.
At least my job was on Wall Street. Madison Avenue, by contrast, was the center of the advertising world, the place where smart and manipulative companies burned loads of cash and creative energy to convince us that we needed to wash our hands with Dial, brush our teeth with Colgate, and wipe our derrieres with Charmin. At least I was going to be an analyst whose job it was to evaluate companies on their merits, not someone whose raison d'etre was to seduce America's soap-opera watchers with meaningless slogans and exaggerated promises.
My new job in equity research, I believed, had nothing to do with manipulation and everything to do with balanced, rational thinking. I had made the leap to Wall Street in part because of the money, but also because being an analyst seemed like the perfect job for a serious guy like me who liked to reason his way through life. Sure, emotion and hype sneaked into my line of work occasionally, but in the end, the stock market was rational, analytical, cool. Fooling people wasn't part of this equation.
Or so I thought. In retrospect my naiveté sounds charming or - let's not be charitable - silly. Of course Wall Street was as much about fooling people as Madison Avenue was, at least if you were one of the corporate executives trying to convince investors - and analysts - that your company's shares would shoot to the moon. But my job, I hastened to tell myself, was all about shooting straight. I had been in a sales role before, and I'd never liked it. Now I'd have a chance to focus entirely on the facts.
I grabbed on to that belief as if it were a life preserver and clutched it as I walked up Madison, then west on Forty-eighth Street and north on Sixth Avenue until I reached the headquarters of Morgan Stanley at Fiftieth and Sixth. I was 36 years old, it was my first day on Wall Street, and I was scared out of my mind.
Not that I had fallen off the turnip truck or anything. I had moved here from Washington, D.C., where I had been director of business analysis at MCI, the brash upstart that was shaking up the telecommunications business. I had interacted with Wall Street and its analysts and bankers for the past two years, trying to make them see my company as positively as I did. What I loved the most was the intellectual sparring as we debated the future of MCI and the telecom industry. It had been a great gig.
But this was the big time. I had been recruited by one of the premier investment banks, a place better suited to Brooks Brothers-clad Greenwich bluebloods than a middle-class public school guy from Buffalo, New York. I was going to be one of a select group of some 35 analysts at Morgan Stanley whose job it was to recommend stocks - and, I had been told, move the financial markets. The prestige and power of my new job filled me with pride. But the responsibility terrified and humbled me. All of a sudden I was in the major leagues, and I'd never even played Class A ball. What was I doing in the middle of this?
Already, I'd ventured pretty far from my beginnings as the son of a scrap-metal dealer with a high school education. I'd been a political science major and math minor at the State University of New York at Albany, where I'd met my wife-to-be, Paula Zimmer, during a Wiffle ball game on the first day of our second year. She studied art history and then went back to school to become a pediatric-intensive-care nurse. And I'd gone on to become a starry-eyed graduate student of Middle East politics at the University of Chicago and Princeton University, certain I wanted to devote my life to bringing peace to that powder keg of a region.
I ended up at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, earning a master's degree in 1979. I was hoping for an assignment that involved foreign policy but instead accepted a $24,000 offer from Coopers & Lybrand, one of the world's largest accounting and consulting firms, as an economic consultant in its Washington, D.C., office. For a few years, I was really happy at Coopers. The job appealed to my inner wonk, and I worked my way up the food chain. But once I was promoted to manager, my job became more and more about selling new consulting services to clients. The whole selling thing turned me off. I didn't want my life to be defined by the spin and hype of selling. Working inside a growing company began to sound a lot more interesting.
From Consulting to Communications: MCI
It just so happened that the Coopers's D.C. office building backed up against the new offices of MCI, an upstart telecommunications company that had been in business since 1968. MCI had emerged as a young, exciting David to AT&T, the ultimate corporate Goliath, with a more responsive, entrepreneurial culture. Its founder, Bill McGowan, had found a way to compete against AT&T in the long distance market even...
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| View all 10 comments |
David Faber (Anchor, CNBC TV) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
A coming-of-age story in an age Wall Street would like to forget. In this riveting memoir, Reingold takes us for an exhilarating ride through the dark alleys of Wall Street and reminds us that in the world of finance, one thing remain constant: Caveat Emptor, Buyer Be Aware. |
Michael K. Powell (Former Chairman of Federal Communications Commission)(MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
Every rocket needs fuel, but Dan Reingold shows us that much of what propelled meteoric rise of the stock market in the late 90s was self-interested, sometimes even criminal, hot air. This book is a riveting and appealing account about the people and events that changed Wall Street and the telecommunications landscape forever. |
John C. Coffee (Adolf A. Berle Professor of Law, Columbia Law School) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
Dan Reingold’s behind-the-scenes account of life as a securities analyst as the stock market bubble of 2000 grew and burst has all the ingredients of a fictional bestseller: heroes and villains, greed, arrogance, and stupidity - and rampant conflicts of interest. But it is not fiction, and it is not the story of a bygone world. The problems and conflicts he reveals remain acute today, even after recent reforms. Read this book before you rely on any investment advisor. |
Eric Hemel (Former Co-Director of U.S. Equity Research, Merrill Lynch), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
This book captures an Shakespearean struggle of an all-star Wall Street analyst who strove to perform his role ethically, while pressured intensely to “play the game” and promote the stocks of his firm’s clients. Decades from now, economic historians will turn to Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst for a complete understanding of the 90s’ stock market bubble. |
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