Home :: Books :: Professional & Technical  

Arts & Photography
Audio CDs
Audiocassettes
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical

Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
Wall Street Meat : My Narrow Escape from the Stock Market Grinder

Wall Street Meat : My Narrow Escape from the Stock Market Grinder

List Price: $13.95
Your Price: $10.46
Product Info Reviews

<< 1 2 >>

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Amusing and irreverent
Review: "Wall Street Meat" is an irreverent tale, larded with expletives and sophomoric humor. And yet, I liked it - perhaps because it's such an amusing corrective to the myth that Wall Street is a buttoned-down place where everyone comports themselves like effete investment bankers. On the contrary, Kessler's Wall Street is like a frat party where the beer never stops flowing. And having proven skills is certainly not a prerequisite for entry into its clubby atmosphere.

Kessler seems a bit off-key when defending old chums Jack Grubman and Frank Quottrone - leaving me with the impression that Wall Street's blasé attitude towards the investing public may have infected him as well. To be sure, there is probably some truth to his criticisms of IPO lockups and other instances of regulatory overreach.

I look forward to reading the sequel, "Running Money".

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Funny, Fun and Shocking
Review: Andy Kessler is a worthy follow-up act to Michael Lewis, and his Wall Street Meat is as fun and enjoyable as Lewis's Liar's Poker. I read this book cover to cover and was chuckling with delight all the way through.

It really brings us upclose and personal with the biggest rogues on Wall Street. The portraits of Jack Grubman and Mary Meeker are especially compelling. I highly recommend this book - easy to read, lucid and with a sense of bemusement only a true new yorker can have...shame we have to wait for his next book

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: I'm not so sure he escaped
Review: Andy Kessler writes a nice book. I mean he's a professional writer and he spent a lot of time on Wall Street before and during the bubble years, up close and personal. And he wasn't a stock broker and he wasn't a trader. He was an analyst in technology stocks during a time when technology stocks mushroomed up like tulips under the windmills. A stock analyst studies the industry and the individual companies. He knows revenues and profits and cash flow and debts and bottom lines. He's a fundamentalist. He makes recommendations. Buy, hold, sell--well, they never actually recommended "sell" in those days. Presumably he knows when the price of a stock is out of step with what it's worth.

But the bubble years were tough times for fundamentalists since the ducks were quacking and when the ducks quack they say, "We don't need no stinkin' fundamentals. We just buy the dips."

At some point Kessler discovered that there's something wrong with this picture. If a stock analyst knows so much why is he working for Goldman Sacks or Morgan Stanley? If he knows which stocks are going to go up and which are going to go down, why hasn't he mortgaged the ranch and milked all his relatives for funds and invested in the stocks himself?

Here's the answer. Hold on to your sweet petunias. As Kessler notes in the very first chapter he's only supposed to get it right 51% of the time, and with a little hedging and ex-post facto double-talk, he can fudge that. In other words, it's crystal ball time, and rational people don't raid the cookie jar to bet on flips of the coin.

Let me tell you what an "analyst" is called in Las Vegas. An analyst is a "tout." That's a "Gold Sheet" or a "Green Sheet" sold in liquor stores and bars with a phone number and some stars and exclamation points advertising their monster "**Superlock of the Week!!!**" That is, you pay them some money and they tell you which sports team to bet on. Needless to say, if they really knew who was going to cover the spread that week, they would mortgage the ranch...etc.

By the way, one of the problems with Andy's strict fundamentalist approach is that the markets are not entirely rational, which is why there is such a thing as technical analysis, which basically says the trend is your friend, or forget the fundamentals, buy the chart--or more deeply understood, buy the irrational exuberance of the public, which is what most of the people who made money in the go-go nineties did. A nice little book that explains some of this is Joel Kurtzman's How the Markets Really Work (2002) where he gives his conviction that, "Markets may move to the beat of their dumbest members," adding, "In my view...markets are not rational."

Anyway, at some point (it is clear to me) Andy Kessler realized that although he wasn't the kind of analyst that touts only those stocks that his firm owns or does business with, he was still a Wall Street strawberry. We can tell he figured this out because somewhere about three-quarters of the way into this very readable and engaging tome, he ups and leaves the comfy confines of Morgan Stanley and a six-figure plus income and begins to do his own investing. That is, he actually bets on his own picks. Wow. Now understand that even here of course he hedges. He forms his own capital management company; that is to say, he gets people to send him money which become chips that he shoves into the pot on their behalf. If he wins, hurrah, and if the stocks he likes tank, well, he still gets paid.

Kessler's is the latest in a long line of "confessional" books written by Wall Street people, almost always ex-Wall Street people--e.g., Where Are the Customers' Yachts? (1940) by Fred Schwed Jr.; License to Steal: the Secret World of Wall Street and the Systematic Plundering of the American Investor (1999) by Anonymous and Timothy Harper...etc. Kessler's book stands out because he was an analyst, not a salesman (i.e., a "broker"), and because he worked with and knew many of the top people on the street and was well-regarded, but was not a top executive. This is also an interesting personal story of a somewhat geek tech guy (but personable) who was smart enough and eventually hip enough to wow 'em in the presentations, who worked hard enough to be (I'm guessing) right more than half the time.

Where his book is not among the best is in what he leaves out. For some reason Kessler doesn't actually reveal how much he was paid (again I guessed at the six figures plus) or how well the stocks he touted performed, nor is he specific about how well he did with his own portfolio. We realize when he gets to trading and discovers the market-maker's spread (Where did THAT come from?) that he really had little idea what life was like for the "retail people" who had to not only buck the spread but, before the rise of Internet trading, pay rather hefty commissions as well--which is why the customers never had any yachts. But Kessler's reticence is probably just as well since everybody knows that there are two things people consistently lie about: sex and money. Kessler doesn't mention the former and is vague about the latter. I tend to respect that.

Bottom line: unless you are Jack Grubman, Frank Quattrone, Henry Blodget and some of the other pieces of Wall Street Meat that Kessler writes about who went down with the ship, you will find this an amusing book, a nice diversion from a long, long time ago on which to reflect. Kessler knows all the buzz words; he knows the players and (somewhat inadvertently) he lets us know him.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A carnivorous bite into Wall Street
Review: Andy Kessler's "Wall Street Meat" is a breeze of a read: an often funny (sometimes hilarious) series of anecdotes that combine to provide an insightful, critical look at the workings of Wall Street and the technology capital markets of the 1990s.

Kessler recounts his days on Wall Street, starting as fresh-scrubbed engineer who stumbles onto the Street almost by accident, to his departure and subsequent career investing in and writing about technology from Silicon Valley. He had the good fortune to learn the ropes from an old school traditionalist, which allowed him both to be successful in the old fashioned sense (achieving a top analyst ranking, as determined by clients) and to understand the transition that happened in the 1990s, as analysts became more involved in investment banking and, in many cases, lost their bearings in the telecom/Internet boom and bust markets (Jack Grubman being the penultimate example).

What makes Kessler's book so powerful is that he calls it as he sees it, from his objective, fundamentally grounded insider's viewpoint. He's made enough money, he's happy in his career, and he cares deeply about the future of Wall Street, so he's not out to perform character assassination; he truly wants to point out what went wrong (and does so in a very entertaining fashion) and make suggestions for reform. He doesn't put much weight in additional regulations and prosecutions, believing that reputation is a more effective mechanism for ensuring proper behavior over the long term. Rather, Kessler pushes structural economic reforms such as a "synthetic Goldman Sachs" in which stock research could be performed by truly independent, stand-alone entities (TheStreet.com isn't there yet, according to Kessler), and ending IPO lockups, to eliminate the huge post-IPO pops that happened during the boom and which led to such a frenzy of deal making. The Dutch auction method for allocating and pricing IPO shares, which Google is using during its upcoming IPO, could also eliminate this problem.

WSM is a must read for Wall Streeters, and people involved in the financing of technology companies. Individual investors (especially tech stock investors) would benefit greatly from reading WSM, to learn Kessler's cautionary tale of how the Street really worked during the boom, and what perversions remain.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Must Read for Young CEOs and CFOs
Review: Having taken a company public in 1995, surviving several liquidity crises (common for advanced medical technology companies trying to negotiate the FDA with innovative therapies), then getting crunched in the `Mother of All Liquidity Crises' in 2001, I found Andy Kessler's book a great read. He accurately captures the personalities, the behaviors, and the ethos of Wall Street from 1990 to the bust. The most unfortunate thing about this period, which Kessler does not mention, is that some great innovations and good young companies had their fates sealed by those who were (mis)guided by greed and fame. All of us were the losers as this was not a zero sum game.

I urge Kessler to write again, this time on the subject of hedge funds and short positions. While hedge funds and short positions can serve a positive purpose in correcting stocks that are overpriced, they can also be a real challenge for young, fragile companies. Short positions are taken with the HOPE that the value of the company will decline significantly. Today, as in the late 90's, some of those with short positions will do whatever it takes to drive a stock price down, including the spreading of lies. Young companies need to focus on execution. They do not have the time nor resources to fend off the swirl of lies that go hand in hand with large short positions. There is no transparency here as with other investment instruments. As such, there is room for plenty of mischief.

This is a must read for any development stage CEO or CFO. For those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Despite the attempts by Spitzer and others, the pattern of the late 90's will again emerge, albeit in a different form.




Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Bitterness and sour grapes
Review: It's almost too cliche to say this was the Liar's Poker of the Tech Bubble, but in many ways, this tell-all tale of the research and banking community in the 90s really hits that mark.

Andy Kessler follows his career as a technology research analyst and the gradual corruption of the analysis field around him. Along the way, he tells the tales of several stars who fell from grace. We meet Jack Grubman, the ultimate telecom insider later associated with singing the praises of a telecom industry in freefall. Frank Quattrone appears in the role of the corrupter, turning unsuspecting analysts like Mary Meeker into salesmen for investment bankers instead of researchers for customers. Henry Blodget plays the ultimate kool-aid drinking tech believer.

Only those involve know if these charicatures are true, but they certainly make for an interesting read. (If they're not true, perhaps they should be!)

Kessler also presents a good overview of what went wrong in the industry. Margins on sales and trading activities diminished, so research needed to be funded on the back of banking deals. Add to that an environment of loose money, spurred by some very succesful tech IPOs. Over time, and industry appears of people whose livelihood depends on making money off the "popping" of hot IPOs as they flourish. Letting "Friends of Frank (Quattrone)" in on the gold rush is part of the deal. The scam is perpetuated by an artificially imposed holding period.

If there's one weak spot in the book, it's an oversimplification of a solution to a problem which the author admits is hard. Would fixing the holding period problem (& allowing new companies to float more stock) really help autocorrect the prices quicker? Or would it encourage "Get rich quick" schemes? The lack of transparency in the process is hard to solve. Maybe the best advice is for the novice investor to beware.

This complaint notwithstanding, the book is an outstanding read. In addition to chuckling and enjoying the fun, you'll come away with a better understanding of what happened in the bubble, and how people slowly get corrupted.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Not Just a Tidbit, but the Whole Enchiada
Review: Mr. Kessler has an interesting take on Wall Street in his first book, Wall Street Meat; the personalities, the firms and the technology boom of the 90's. As a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal's opinion page, he has built a reputation of providing unique and interesting insight at Wall Street and technology companies. His approach includes anecdotal evidence that are both interesting and funny, yet sad and telling. One could compare them to both P. J. O'Roarke and Michael Lewis.
While early chapters tend to tell stories regarding the people and situations he finds, the conclusion discusses the conflicts and motivations of those people and is right on the money. As a Wall Street veteran of 20 years now living on the West Coast, Mr. Kessler's work reminds me of the whirlwind tour that technology investing has been. Keep up the good work, and I can't wait to see the sequel mentioned in the back of the book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Very interesting! A real pager turner
Review: The author, an ex-analyst of Morgan Stanley, talked of his personal encounters with some of the fallen angels of Wall Street (Mary Meeker is still there), the change in the role of analysts from research/brokerage support to investment banking/IPO tool that effectively broke the firewall/Long Wall between the two functions within the same company at investors' expense, and the interference of regulatory bodies that did more harm than good.

To me, this is the second most interesting book of its kind, after Fiasco and better than Liar's Poker. It wont help your trading or investment, if you already know the uselessness (or how intoxicating in the author's term) of "recommendations" of those analysts who are paid in proportion to the qty and quality of suckers. The many bits and pieces are so interesting. If you wanna read for fun, this must be it.

p.s. In case the term "Morgan Stanley" still means something to you, listen to Barton Biggs only, and neglect all else, especially Bryon Wien and Mary Meeker, in the author's opinion.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A Fun Read
Review: This book was pretty poorly written and fraught with annoying typos - but, nonetheless, a fun read for us outsiders who have only heard names like Jack Grubman and Frank Quattrone rather recently. There must have been a push to get this book out while it was still timely - it could have been brilliant with a little more time and effort, but if nothing else, it kept me entertained and enabled me to have more interesting (at least in my own mind) conversations with the financial types.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A Fun Read
Review: This book was pretty poorly written and fraught with annoying typos - but, nonetheless, a fun read for us outsiders who have only heard names like Jack Grubman and Frank Quattrone rather recently. There must have been a push to get this book out while it was still timely - it could have been brilliant with a little more time and effort, but if nothing else, it kept me entertained and enabled me to have more interesting (at least in my own mind) conversations with the financial types.


<< 1 2 >>

© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates