This book takes the reader on an insider's tour of the psychology of stock market investing. In more than 3,000 hours of interviews and observations, Smith granted some of the most famous insiders on Wall Street the protection of anonymity to procure their deepest and most frank views on the operation of the market. Their words are heard here in vivid and often surprising detail. What emerges is a startling portrait of how the prejudices of six different types of players -- fundamentalists, insiders, cyclists, traders, efficient market believers, and transformational idea adherents -- influence the ups and downs of the market. Smith explains how new trends, such as computer trading and mutual and retirement fund investing, interact with these psychologies -- drawing a remarkable picture of how market behavior is inherently more human than technical.
The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide: The Secrets of a Career Coach is the only complete, up-to-date, and practical guide for financial industry professionals seeking new or better jobs in today’s brutally competitive environment. Author Roy Cohen spent more than 10 years providing outplacement services to Goldman Sachs’ employees. In this book, he shares finance-specific job-hunting insights you simply won’t find anywhere else. Drawing on his immense experience helping financial industry professionals find and keep outstanding positions, Cohen tells you what to do when and if you’re fired (or ready to move), how to develop a “game plan” and search targets, how to build your “story”, how to move from the sell-side to the buy side, and much more. You’ll find industry-specific guidance on interview strategy, resumes, follow-up, references, and even negotiation with real examples drawn from Cohen’s own practice.
In The Other Side of Wall Street, Minyanville.com founder and former hedge fund honcho Todd Harrison shares never-before-told stories from the hidden side of Wall Street, including the adrenaline rush of trading at the highest levels, Wall Street’s super-indulgent lifestyles; Harrison’s time in the trenches fighting with (and then against) Jim Cramer; why he left investing completely, and how he returned to earn his redemption. Thousands of readers have tasted Harrison’s story in a recent Dow Jones MarketWatch serialization: now for the first time, he shares his entire extraordinary personal memoir. You’ll walk alongside Harrison through the "golden door" that took him into Morgan Stanley in its 1990s heyday. Share his ringside view of the explosive growth of derivatives, and the disasters that followed. Ride the emotional roller coaster of colossal wins and losses and discover what it’s really like to work with Jim Cramer. Then travel with Harrison through the 2000s, the most tumultuous decade in investing history. Harrison’s seen it all, done it all, and earned perspective and insight available to only a few. If you want to know what it’s really like at Wall Street’s pinnacle–and in its deepest depths–one book will tell you: The Other Side of Wall Street.
Wall Street Women tells the story of the first generation of women to establish themselves as professionals on Wall Street. Since these women, who began their careers in the 1960s, faced blatant discrimination and barriers to advancement, they created formal and informal associations to bolster one another's careers. In this important historical ethnography, Melissa S. Fisher draws on fieldwork, archival research, and extensive interviews with a very successful cohort of first-generation Wall Street women. She describes their professional and political associations, most notably the Financial Women's Association of New York City and the Women's Campaign Fund, a bipartisan group formed to promote the election of pro-choice women. Fisher charts the evolution of the women's careers, the growth of their political and economic clout, changes in their perspectives and the cultural climate on Wall Street, and their experiences of the 2008 financial collapse. While most of the pioneering subjects of Wall Street Women did not participate in the women's movement as it was happening in the 1960s and 1970s, Fisher argues that they did produce a "market feminism" which aligned liberal feminist ideals about meritocracy and gender equity with the logic of the market.
Discusses how to eliminate unethical behavior at the workplace, demonstrating how to master corporate politics ethically through an understanding of political styles and an application of strategies in such areas as networking and idea promotion.
What happens when you're soaring high at the top of the stock market game and you suddenly lose everything...including your family, your home, your money, and your dignity? A thirty five year old Wall Street mogul discovers life at the other side of the looking glass when he is rendered homeless in New York City by his jealous peers. He's at the lowest of the low and is playing with the idea of suicide. Then, when it feels like all hope is lost, a chance meeting changes his life forever. A group of homeless people befriend the broken investor and start to help him get back on his feet. Inch by inch he began to crawl towards success again and leave ruin behind. There's one problem though. His old "friends" from Wall Street are still on the prowl trying to sabotage his last chance at a new beginning. Will he rise above this critical struggle and make a glorious comeback? Or will he fall miserably again at the hands of his wealthy enemies? Everything's at stake in this financial frenzy that will have you on the edge of your seat from start to finish. Find out his fate in this gripping page turner that documents one man's fight for survival against impossible odds on the frozen winter streets of Manhattan.
Financial collapses—whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market—are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and produced through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy. Ho, who worked at an investment bank herself, argues that bankers’ approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as “the best and the brightest,” investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, Liquidated reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.
In The Battle for Investment Survival, the turf is Wall Street, the goal is to preserve your capital at all costs, and to win is to "make a killing without being killed." This memorable classic, originally written in 1935, offers a fresh perspective on investing from times past. The Battle for Investment Survival treats investors to a straightforward account of how to profit-and how to avoid profit loss-in what Loeb would describe as the constant tug-of-war between rising and falling markets. Book jacket.
"A major contribution . . . on the behavior of common stocks in the United States." --Financial Analysts' Journal The consistently bestselling What Works on Wall Street explores the investment strategies that have provided the best returns over the past 50 years--and which are the top performers today. The third edition of this BusinessWeek and New York Times bestseller contains more than 50 percent new material and is designed to help you reshape your investment strategies for both the postbubble market and the dramatically changed political landscape. Packed with all-new charts, data, tables, and analyses, this updated classic allows you to directly compare popular stockpicking strategies and their results--creating a more comprehensive understanding of the intricate and often confusing investment process. Providing fresh insights into time-tested strategies, it examines: Value versus growth strategies P/E ratios versus price-to-sales Small-cap investing, seasonality, and more
Bobby Monks is blowing the whistle on Wall Street, giving middle class Americans the low down on how they’re being fleeced of their retirement money—and what they can do about it Every month our financial statements arrive, and every month we glance at them, trying to understand, hoping that we’ll come out ahead. But most of us have no idea what’s really going on or the costs involved. According to Bobby Monks—who has been a banker and borrower, investor and entrepreneur—financial firms and money managers have complicated the investing process to keep us in the dark, profiting from our ignorance. Having dealt with the financial sector throughout his career, Monks has seen it all. In Uninvested, he reveals how, when, and why the relationship between us and our money managers became corrupted—and what we can do to fix it. Monks shows how the system works not only against us as individuals but also against society at large. Without our knowledge or approval, our money is diverted into the pockets of CEOs and misappropriated, promoting business practices that contribute to economic inequality, political dysfunction, and environmental woe. Monks’ experiences give him a unique perspective on how we got to this point. Drawing on original research and interviews with key figures such as Vanguard founder Jack Bogle, legendary investor Carl Icahn, and former congressman Barney Frank of the Dodd-Frank Act, Monks teaches us how to take back ownership and control of our money. As he writes: Even in the decades preceding the most recent downturn, very few investors enjoyed financial success equal to that of their money managers. Given this, I have long wondered why investors don’t pull their money out of the system en masse. I suspect that it is because most feel powerless. Unaware of the implications of their investments and unable to penetrate the excruciating complexity of the system that facilitates them, many seem to seek refuge in their money managers’ aura of sophistication, pretense of competence, and projection of certainty. It seems to me that most investors are simply sleepwalking through the investing process. They have become uninvested. When we outsource our investing, we sacrifice control—but not responsibility. My goal in writing this book is to convince you that the best (and only) way to fix this broken system is to awaken a critical mass of engaged investors and recruit them to participate more fully in the investing process.
