The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale Of Spectacular Excess

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. Na?ve 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. *This book may have minor shelfwear.