American-Stock-Exchange

Loved PLAY MONEY from start to finish. It moves as fast as the trading floor where Pedersen finds herself at the tender age of 18. Newly arrived in the Big Apple she takes life in the fast lanes mostly in stride, along with the crazy antics of her cohorts. These people and situations were made for a sitcom and I can't believe that one hasn't been made of it yet. You'll learn a little about the stock exchange and options trading but not so much that the stories ever get bogged down. A fun read for anyone who has ever been in the biz (I was a currency trader in the 90s) but also if your just looking to cheer along a determined young person trying to pull herself up by the proverbial bootstraps.

This is not a financial book, though it tells you just enough to enjoy and understand what's going on. It's much more like LIAR'S POKER in that you get all the funny anecdotes about traders and the fear and greed that drives them. Pedersen is the perfect person to tell the tale, newly arrive on the stock exchange from upstate New York at age 18. My Uncle works on the trading floor of the NYSE and since the advent of cell phones and better computers it's certainly a new era. Pedersen's book is wonderful as a historical account of how it was before all that. And her personal story of moving to the big city from a small town, without much money and only a high school diploma from a public school, and setting out to achieve the American Dream is entertaining as well. And also, I would think, an inspiration to all ambitious young people (seeing as she wasn't even a good math student!). I particularly enjoyed all the bets and contests the guys would start -- as if making and losing millions of dollars every few minutes wasn't enough excitement!

I am working my way backward through the Pedersen oeuvre, having just read LAST CALL, BEGINNER'S LUCK, and GOING AWAY PARTY. I thought this was going to be another novel, but SURPRISE, it is an account of Pedersen's adventures going to Wall Street back in 1983, the start of boom times. She was only 18 and coming from a small town in upstate New York, a self-admitted hick, unable to find the stock exchange on her third day of work because it was raining and the flag wasn't flying. The supervisor had never heard THAT excuse before. Anyway, Pedersen is as light-hearted and charming in her nonfiction as in the novels. She doesn't come off as being a child whiz kid, though I imagine you must be pretty smart to do what she did, but credits her phenomenal success more to being in the right place at the right time, getting up early, and loving the work, action, excitement. Her coworkers are unbelievable and highly entertaining in their practical jokes and bizarre priorities. For someone who has lived in Indiana her entire life (me), it was fun to read about leaving home for a big city right after high school graduation, something probably many of us dreamed of doing, but for whatever reason didn't. This book reminded me why American is such a great country -- not so much because a teenage girl of divorced working class parents from a former steel town can strike it rich in just a few years, but because the young woman was able to make the opportunity for herself, no matter what happened after that. Though I'm glad she took her money and ran, and am looking forward to the next novel, HEART'S DESIRE. HOWEVER, if she wants to write another nonfiction book, I'd be happy to go along for the ride. Pedersen has the great comic/storytelling gift of making getting up in the morning into something funny and interesting. I read an essay she wrote about growing up with her mother (a nurse) on the Internet and it is laugh-out-loud funny.

as I am, then you'll learn a great deal from "Bleeding Bull". I lost money in the stock market last year and this book has begun to open my eyes to the games played on naive investors like myself. The writer's style is clear and lively, and he gives many examples of Wall Street's tricks. A real eye opener!

In Bleeding Bull: The Stock Market Bubble And The American Middle Class, Vladimir Sarkoff reveals the role of Wall Street brokerages, the Feds, the media, and the ordinary, unsophisticated investor in the creation of the stock market bubble of the 90s and the democratization of stock ownership during that turbulent decade. An insightful and sardonic writer, Sarkoff's focus on the aftermath of the stock bubble bursting is as insightful as it is revealing. Of special note is Sarkoff's warnings that the next bubble might be forming. Vladimir Sarkoff's Bleeding Bull is highly recommended reading for anyone contemplating investing in the market or who has already engaged in the development of an investment portfolio.

If you like Wall Street and financial intrigue, you will love this book. The real beauty of it, however, is that you don't need to be a stock broker or lawyer to follow the story. Thrills galore!

The villain is modeled on Marc Rich; coincidentally I read it and started corresponding with the author just a week before Clinton pardoned Rich. A great anthropological study of the trading subsculture at the end of the 20th century. Very good, and especially great if you're an in-house counsel at a major house who works with derivatives.

If you don't think the market can ever crash again, this book is not only entertaining, but it is also exceptionally educational in a not-too-painful way. The reality of the world's interlocked financial system is almost as bad as the "bad guys" in this financial thriller. With the exception of wanting to kill the occasional roadblock in the path to their financial profits, the bad guys in this book seem to think - and act - a lot like any other aggressive group of traders. So when young Wall St. attorney Rick Hansen takes over a job where his predecessor was mysteriously killed, and gets sucked into the complexities of the trading jungle, you're not sure if the system will topple over on its own, or with a little help from a criminal conspiracy using the latest super-computers and software wizardy. Even if you've never traded an option in your life, this is definitely a must read - like the early Paul Erdman (Crash of '79, etc.) novels.

This book provides scant new insights into how Wall Street works, and the few that it provides are of limited credibility, because the author and "co-author" fictionalized everything. It is pale in comparison to the recent Enron books and to Born to Steal, which covered much the same ground but in much more vivid and exciting ways, with a powerful narrative that named names.

Every once in a while, one of the rapacious cretins inhabiting the brokerage houses of Wall Street has a twinge of conscience and a need to confess, and so he writes a mea culpa to cleanse his soul. The anonymous author, now a modest financial advisor in a small town, manages to look like a hero with a human heart while exposing the compromised nature of the securities business. If you have any illusions left about the goodness of humanity, don't read this book. You'll lose them. Part confessional, part cautionary tale, this first person narrative makes Wall Street brokers look like the dregs of humanity. If this sensational and rather novelistic tale is to be believed (and it is) then even lawyers and used car salesman tell fewer lies and steal less than Wall Street brokers.

License to Steal is the latest in a genre that goes back to at least the robber-baron days of the 19th century and probably to the earliest days of capitalism in renaissance Italy. One of my favorites is the very entertaining Where Are the Customers' Yachts? (1940) by Fred Schwed Jr. In that little book, studded with New Yorker cartoons, an innocent asks a broker the title question and is told, naive fool that he is, that the customers don't have any yachts. Only brokers and officers of the brokerage firm have yachts. According to the authors, today's breed of white collar crook doesn't spend his ill-gotten lucre on anything so romantic as a yacht, preferring German motor cars, cocaine and Cuban cigars, floozies, French champagne and blackjack. The degenerate get more degenerate it would appear.

I had a broker myself, back in the days of my naiveté, and I recall she told me one day that she was hoping the market would plunge a hundred points (that was in the days when a hundred-point swing meant something). I was momentarily stunned since I was a client with some serious money in those stocks that she was hoping would plunge. But she had forgotten herself for the moment and was talking to me as she would to one of her fellow brokers. THEY wanted a plunge so they could stir up some action and make some money on commissions. And therein lies what the authors of License to Steal call on page 265 the "basic conflict of interest" in "the securities business," namely that what is good for the broker is to move "clients in and out of positions to generate commissions" (and to take advantage of the spread), while what is good for clients is just the opposite, to pay a minimum for commissions and to get trimmed by the spread as seldom as possible. This conflict is still with us although, by trading over the Net without a broker, the commissions are much cheaper and the danger of getting trimmed by in-house spreads is lessen considerably. Nonetheless, the industry as a whole still has a vested interest in churning the accounts of investors. We see this in the frequent upgrades and downgrades issued by brokerage firms, recommendations that encourage a lot of buying and selling. The only way this conflict is going to be eliminated is for brokers to gain only when their clients gain. I wouldn't hold my breath for that reform however, since it would have the effect of sending the vast majority of brokers back to telemarketing or to selling aluminum sliding.

If you like License to Steal, and I think you will, since it is very hard to put down with the lurid picture of piggy greed and human stupidity it paints, you will also like F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street (1997) by Frank Partnoy. Partnoy's book is about derivatives sales people who are as morally degenerate as the characters in License to Steal. The only substantive difference in the books is that Partnoy's book is not anonymous and neither are the firms he worked for.

Reading this book was like taking a step back in time. I worked as a broker right out of college for a company that sold microcap stocks and is since defunct. I can say without a doubt that everything in this book is the absolute truth. From the hidden commissions to the trips to Atlantic City it is all true. Recently I was surfing the NASD regulatory website and found a lot of my old managers had been listed, fined and expunged from the NASD for life for the things that they did. From lying, to churning accounts, to buying stocks without authorization. Next time your phone rings and someone is pitching a stock to you beware. The only person that will make money is the person making the call. This was a fascinating real life account. If you want to be financially secure get a good financial planner and get rich the slow way. Compound interest over time.

I bought this assuming to learn a little more about equities trading around the globe, surprise! Its a replica/reprint of the 1921 edition of the book, not really up to date enuff to trade off. Note that they didn't sell as many books in those pre-Amazon days, this is marked # 168 of nnnn?

Of interest to historians or the incurably inquisitive only. TP

"Ladies of the Goldfield Stock Exchange" was horrible, and that's putting it lightly. The ladies stock exchange was overshadowed by the outbreak of pneumonia, the auto race, and the personal lives of the characters. The narrator switched too often, and the women had too many problems for the reader to focus on. Just when you became interested in one life, it abruptly switched to another, and the chapters were to short, which led to an overabundance of chapters. The ending was very sudden and too happy - don't get me wrong, I love happy endings; but, with the history of the women, it just didn't fit. The lack of an epilogue did not help, either. A waste of time and money. I do not recommend.