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Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader by Frank Partnoy
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Frank Partnoy Edition: Paperback Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 1999-02-01 ISBN: 0140278796 Number of pages: 288 Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street TraderBook Review: Supercharged, Super Leveraged and Super Lethal Summary: 5 Stars
I love starting a review with a few memorable quotes because if you read the book the quotes will bring it all back no matter how long its been since you read it, and if you did not read the book and are intrigued by the quotes you'll buy it on the spot (at least I do). So here it goes:
Pg. 126 Frank quotes Warren Buffett, "If you don't know who the sucker is, it is you".
Pg. 130 Quoting another bond salesman, "Let me tell you something, If a bond can not be sold with two hockey tickets and a good bottle of wine, the bond can not be sold"
Pg. 176 "The involvement of European issuers seemed fitting. The first active derivatives market had opened in Europe in 1688, when traders on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange began writing derivative contracts...Derivatives were returning home"
Pg. 182 Talking about Mexican Banks, "They craved risk...they wanted to gamble. They wanted, they demanded, "leverage"-the ability to borrow to take on greater risk"
Pg 205 "Out of curiosity I asked everyone what other jobs they would be willing to take instead of their current jobs at Morgan Stanley if the pay remained the same...Would you rather work at McDonalds or at Morgan Stanley? For the same pay - McDonalds, without a doubt...Shoveling manure or Morgan Stanley? Manure sounded pretty good to everyone."
Pg 226 Talking about packaging a product for the purpose of creating an illusion of a gain, which happens to create the largest fee's ever ($75 million), "Of the $571 million, the investor immediately realized a huge gain, roughly $400 million."
- This was a totally smoke and mirrors gain done strictly for the purpose beefing up returns.
Pg. 247 At the end of his 3 year stint on the Street, "I now believed everything was a fraud, and I had a well founded basis for my beliefs. Derivatives were a fraud, investment banking was a fraud, the Mexican and the Japanese financial systems were frauds..."
Epilogue Pg 251 "What lessons did I draw from my experience selling derivatives? I believe derivatives are the most recent example in the history of finance: Wall Street bilks Main St."
Pg 252 "Could a $70,000-a-year Securities and Exchange Commission investigator ever catch a $700,000-a-year derivatives salesman?"
Pg. 256 "70% of derivatives professionals say they expect big losses in the coming year"
Pg 277 "If the SEC and the U.S. Attorney's office are busy prosecuting basic cases-insider trading, the mafia selling non-existent stocks-how can they possibly compete against the big boys, especially when the big boys are tucked away in Grand Cayman, protected by special tax legislation, insulated from disclosure requirements and hidden from the public view with a P.O. Box address?"
Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffets partner in Berkshire Hathaway recommends this book highly. (See my other reviews and my blog for a complete list of his recommendations ( bloglines.com/blog/KevinKingston ). This book gives you a great understanding of the products that Wall Street firms are putting together and the reasons they are doing it. For example a LIBOR-Cubed Hedge and other supercharged, super leveraged and super dangerous, for those that don't understand them, which is most people. It also describes the frequency that even the packager, Morgan Stanley could not put a value on the complex derivative products.
By Kevin Kingston, Author of: A 20,000% Gain in Real Estate
Summary of Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street TraderFIASCO is the shocking story of one man's education in the jungles of Wall Street. As a young derivatives salesman at Morgan Stanley, Frank Partnoy learned to buy and sell billions of dollars worth of securities that were so complex many traders themselves didn't understand them. In his behind-the-scenes look at the trading floor and the offices of one of the world's top investment firms, Partnoy recounts the macho attitudes and fiercely competitive ploys of his office mates. And he takes us to the annual drunken skeet-shooting competition, FIASCO, where he and his colleagues sharpen the killer instincts they are encouraged to use against their competitiors, their clients, and each other. FIASCO is the first book to take on the derivatves trading industry?the most highly charged and risky sector of the stock market. More importantly, it is a blistering indictment of the largely unregulated market in derivatives and serves as a warning to unwary investors about real fiascos, which have cost billions of dollars.
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