NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A former Galleon Group trader
portrays an after-hours Wall Street culture where drugs and sex are
rampant and billions in trading commissions flow to those who dangle the
most enticements.
A remarkable writing debut, filled with indelible moments, The Buy
Side shows as no book ever has the rewards--and dizzying
temptations--of making a living on the Street.
Growing up in the 1980's Turney Duff was your average kid from
Kennebunk, Maine, eager to expand his horizons. After trying - and
failing - to land a job as a journalist, he secured a trainee position
at Morgan Stanley and got his first feel for the pecking order that
exists in the trading pits. Those on the "buy side," the traders who
make large bets on whether a stock will rise or fall, are the "alphas"
and those on the "sell side," the brokers who handle their business, are
eager to please.
How eager to please was brought home stunningly to Turney in 1999 when
he arrived at the Galleon Group, a colossal hedge-fund management firm
run by secretive founder Raj Rajaratnam. Finally in a position to trade
on his own, Turney was encouraged to socialize with the sell side and
siphon from his new broker friends as much information as possible. Soon
he was not just vacuuming up valuable tips but also being lured into a
variety of hedonistic pursuits. Naïve enough to believe he could keep up
the lifestyle without paying a price, he managed to keep an eye on his
buy-and-sell charts and, meanwhile, pondered the strange goings on at
Galleon, where tens of millions were being made each week in sometimes
mysterious ways.
At his next positions, at Argus Partners and J.L. Berkowitz, Turney
climbed to even higher heights - and, as it turned out, plummeted to
even lower depths - as, by day, he solidified his reputation one of
the Street's most powerful healthcare traders, and by night, he blazed a
path through the city's nightclubs, showing off his social genius and
voraciously inhaling any drug that would fill the void he felt inside.
A mesmerizingly immersive journey through Wall Street's first millennial
decade, and a poignant self portrait by a young man who surely would
have destroyed himself were it not for his decision to walk away from a
seven-figure annual income, The Buy Side is one of the best
coming-of-age-on-the-Street books ever written.
