The Buy Side A Wall Street Trader'sTale of Spectacular Excess by Turney Duff (Crown Busness, 2013,
320 pages, $26,00) can be read as a cautionary tale of the risks and
rewards of success on Wall Street, a history of a time that may have
seen its end with the past few years of struggle in the markets, a
Dante-esque vision of the inevitable corruption that occurs when too much
money and too little regulation and restraint co-exist, or merely the
story of one man who could not resist the allures of the world in
which he functioned. I choose to see all of the above and more in
this disturbing and compelling account by Turney Duff of his years of
self-destructive behavior as a hedge fund trader on buy side during
the most recent go-go years of wall street from the late eighties to
the crash of the 2007 and 2008.
Turney Duff's tale begins in January of
1984 when he is an eighth grader whose father has decided to travel
through a snow storm to take him to a wrestling practice he doesn't want to attend at the local
high school . His picture of a cold,
demanding, undemonstrative man establishes the “search for father”
theme he chooses to pursue as his primary motivation throughout his
spectacular rise and fall. Duff is paired against several members of
the team, pinning each before being pinned himself by the team's
star. He never wrestles again, choosing to play football, a sport of
which his father disapproves and never sees him play, in both high
school and college. He floats through Ohio University in Miami majoring in English before
heading for New York, where he imagines himself in a career as a
writer. After some months of rejection, he calls upon an uncle in the
investment business who opens enough doors for him to gain entrée
into the world of Wall Street, for which he has no relevant training
or experience except to follow his uncle's advice and to tell
potential employers that he wants to sell. He also has an extremely likable personality.
Duff's Wall Street career begins when
he is accepted as an intern at an investment house where he's the
only new hire without an MBA or an Ivy League degree. According to
him, he's told to watch, learn, and practice. He finds the excitement
of the trading floor the most attractive place to be, and a mentor
tells him he won't be asked to take a role on a trading team, he must
sell himself to its members. Thus begins his upward rise. Eventually
he becomes a specialist in health care stocks and becomes trader on
the buy side, that is he purchases stocks from all over the Street, a
position which places him in the position of making other people
wealthy. The power of such a position is that it makes the sellers
romance him in order to gain his attention and orders. The
attraction, apparently from every corner of the investment community,
and competition for his largess is fueled at first by free dinners,
tickets to games, trips, and copious amount of alcohol. Soon the
attractions are also unlimited access to beautiful women and lots of
cocaine. Throughout this period of increasing success, Duff pictures
himself as something of an iconoclast, dressing in hipster, if not
bizarre fashion, in a world of rock and roll and hip hop music.
Frequently he describes his suppliers as friends who just naturally
give him everything that feeds his worst instincts, but, while
getting all the accouterments that fulfill his fantasies finding
himself to be empty during
rare moments of self-examination.
Meanwhile, without actually detailing
anything that looks like the hard work of learning about the products
he buys and sells, he continues to move to upwardly
mobile hedge funds where he makes untold amounts of money,
culminating in a chapter of the book which consists only of a
photograph of a bonus check for 1.8 million dollars. Duff's life
careens downwards while his success apparently continues unabated as
he spends money without thought in his urge to fill what he perceives
as his emptiness. Meanwhile he takes on a full time girlfriend
(unbelievably beautiful, of course) and thoughtlessly conceives a
child. The Buy Side stands
in intriguing counterpoint to John Coates' The
Hour Between Dog and Wolf, a
thoughtful study of risk taking among traders in a large brokerage
house. Coates explores the effects of risk taking, winning and
losing, and large swings in the movements of the market from the
perspective of how our biology effects our ability to make effective
decisions. Coates writes about the euphoria that ensues when
testosterone and adrenaline course through a trader's body, not
unlike the experience that Duff appears to have had during his
trading career. He also writes about the “instinct” that develops
in experienced traders to time their trades effectively. Duff
experiences the euphoria and the subsequent depression Coates
describes, seeking to control and contain them in his incessant use
of drugs, alcohol, and sex. He does so without insight or
introspection.
Turney Duff
Turney Duff has worked on Wall Street since 1994, including at Morgan
Stanley, the Galleon Group, Argus Partners, and J.L. Berkowitz. A
graduate of Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, he has
written and produced two short films. He currently lives in Long Island
City, New York. He no longer works on Wall Street and tells me he has been sober for 3 1/2 years, during which time he was battled his worse demons and written the present volume, which he hope is the first, with more to come.
Eventually
Duff's lifestyle catches up with him as he ends up in rehab with his
life falling down around him. Writing his story and seem to be the
extent of his therapy. Despite, or perhaps because, of the life
Turney Duff leads, this book is intriguing and, at times, exciting.
His hedonistic, self-indulgent lifestyle may be attractive to some,
but serves as a cautionary tale for anyone who looks and thinks. His
suggestion that the lifestyle is inevitable doesn't wash, but Duff's
experiences and character signal an essential internal state that serves as a warning. The book is at once highly entertaining and horrifying.
The Buy Side A Wall Street Trader's Tale of SpectacularExcess by Turney Duff (Crown
Busness, 2013, 320 pages, $26,00) is well worth the read, but may
prove distasteful to some audiences. I received The Buy
Side from the publisher as an
electronic galley through Edelwiess.
No comments:
Post a Comment