The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
These Wall Street war-stories are true – and I should know
Two memoirs lift the lid on the traumatising excesses of the finance industry
We read about liquid lunches, Vegas trips and doggybags of cocaine
In 2013, a week before the publication of my memoir, The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader’s Tale of Spectacular Excess, a friend called and told me that since I’d written a book, I could now be considered an expert. “An expert in what?” I asked. “He said, whatever subject you wrote about.” I thought for a moment, then said, “So, I’m an expert in cocaine, hookers and insider trading?” “Pretty much,” he replied. At that moment, I wondered whether it was possible to unpublish a book. It is not.
All Wall Street memoirs reside in the shadow of Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, an insider account of the excesses and absurdities of Wall
Street during the 1980s, offering a candid glimpse into the world of bond trading at Salomon Brothers. To grasp the size of Lewis’s towering shadow, consider this: if you were to ask finance professionals what their favourite finance book is, you’d likely hear Liar’s Poker from approximately 50 per cent of them. But among those who cite it as their favourite, half of them haven’t actually read it: it just adorns their fancy bookcases.
After finishing Carrie Sun’s new memoir, Private Equity (Bloomsbury, ÌÌÌÌ), I took my dog Woody for a walk in the New York City rain. We strolled through midtown Manhattan, not far from Sun’s former office at “Carbon” – an investment firm she pseudonymises – and I thought about her book. A woman on the verge of her thirties, armed with an impressive resumé, finds herself unexpectedly thrust into the role of an assistant to one of the “masters of the universe”. Little did she know, “assistant” meant surrendering her entire life to serve Carbon’s billionaire founder. From crafting impromptu speeches that had to be funny, insightful and heartfelt to figuring out the logistics involved in flying by helicopter from the Hamptons to MetLife stadium so her boss’s daughter could see Taylor Swift – it was all just another day at the office. As Sun pushed past the edge of burnout, it was only a matter of time before something had to give, and it did.
Private Equity is well-written, compelling, perceptive. It isn’t an attempt to mimic Liar’s Poker; instead, it feels like delving into the story of a supporting character in Lewis’s book. There’s also more to Sun’s title than there may seem. There’s the obvious financial meaning: “private equity” is a term used to refer to investments made in private companies or assets, often with the goal of acquiring or growing those assets for profit. Metonymically, it’s the world where the story takes place.
But there’s also a metaphorical meaning, for we dive into the “private equity” of Sun’s character, exploring her personal and emotional assets, investments, and transformations. As I (and Woody) walked across Third Avenue, I wondered whether the title was even meant ironically, or as a critique, suggesting that the pursuit of financial success in the private-equity world can come at the cost of personal or ethical values.
Above all, Private Equity made me think about my life and choices. I saw many similarities between Sun’s journey and my own, although, at first glance, we couldn’t be more unalike. Sun went to MIT and graduated early; I went
to Ohio University and graduated late. She probably never got a B in school; I only got Bs. She was the ultimate professional in the office; I was like a devilish Boy Scout playing pranks. She threw up from nerves; I threw up from tequila. She wiped out on the treadmill while trying to answer an email; I faked a mugging by throwing myself on the pavement so I could get out of work after a three-day bender. After seeing a therapist, Sun eventually defied her boss and quit; I had two stints in rehab, and emerged to a half-furnished “dream house” on the brink of foreclosure, from which my girlfriend and daughter had moved out. (Sun’s book’s title had a deeper meaning; mine did not.)
The other memoir that jumped the queue to my nightstand was Gary Stevenson’s The Trading Game: A Confession (Allen Lane, ÌÌÌÌ), set not in Wall Street but in Canary Wharf. The title is very much in the vein of Liar’s Poker: the “trading game” is an actual game that Stevenson won near the end of 2006, serving as his golden ticket into finance. The game, a simulation, is in truth a numbers game in which the “traders” make bets on the total value of the cards held collectively. This forms a terrific scene early in the book, and the fact that the final game was rigged against Stevenson, yet he was allowed to
win, serves as a metaphorical foreshadowing. For a self-proclaimed mathematics nerd, Stevenson is a fine wordsmith too.
The Trading Game delves deeper into the intricacies of finance than most memoirs in this genre do. Stevenson, who worked at Citibank’s Short Term Interest Rates Trading desk, at one point risked his job, livelihood and $40.8m (then c£24m) in a single trade. He takes readers into the anatomy of such trades, allowing them to experience the exhilarating highs and daunting lows. His greatest strength is in his ability to unravel complex concepts, making even topics such as FX swaps accessible and easy to comprehend. Throughout The Trading Game, readers encounter memorable lines such as “The best trading is done with your nose; it smells like stupidity” and “You don’t make money by being right, but by being right when others are wrong.”
And on the way to becoming a millionaire, he ticks off all the elements you expect to find in such a memoir: the theatrics of bonus day, the hazing rituals in the office, and the significance of happy-hour gatherings and lavish wining and dining. There are liquid lunches, a Vegas trip and a cocaine doggy-bag, which he turned down; if he hadn’t, he might have been writing a different kind of memoir. (I can tell him that from experience. The most quoted part of my own book was what I said to a bouncer outside of a crowded nightclub: “I don’t wait in lines; I snort them.”)
Sun threads a needle between finance bros who want to consume stories of Wall Street debauchery and those who hate all things Wall Street (not just the stories). Her memoir is more about the human condition than anything financially related: it’ll appeal to the Devil Wears Prada crowd more than the Wolf of Wall Street mob. (I like the former more, myself.)
Stevenson, meanwhile, will attract and please insiders, aspiring insiders, and anyone concerned with income inequality. His portrayal as an unlikely hero, brimming with wit and a low tolerance for nonsense, makes for an engaging read.
The saying “to open one’s kimono” is a metaphor borrowed from business culture, signifying a revealing disclosure or sharing of intimate details. In their memoirs, both Sun and Stevenson open their kimonos, candidly sharing their traumas and experiences. To pen a finance memoir, rather than depart the industry ordinarily, it seems you need either a crash-and-burn narrative or a daring escape from the financial rat-race – which is akin to breaking out of Alcatraz. But what binds all such memoirs together is the realisation that finance, for all its allure and excess, is a world where success often comes at a cost, a cost not measured in dollars but in the essence of who we become. Private Equity and The Trading Game are excellent additions to the genre. As in all the best finance memoirs, every trade carries a story, and every story carries a trade.