Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst (Dan Reingold)

Year Published: 2006
Genre: Memoir

Remember the '90s? Can you recall the soaring heights of the market? Do you have some inkling of what happened when the telecom bubble burst, or were you too young or poor to care?

I can say without shame that prior to reading this book, I had only the murkiest picture of the telecom bubble and its subsequent pop. The key players -- MCI WorldCom, Global Crossing, Qwest, AT&T, and all the others -- were either complete unknowns or near-blank slates. I lost money in the market in 2000/2001 like everyone else who had a toehold, but I was much too young to care about the particulars.

While Confessions certainly won't win any awards for its prose, it did blow the doors off my ignorance surrounding the telecom debacle. I became intimately familiar with people like Bernie Ebbers, Jack Grubman, and Sandy Weill. The entire idea of investment banking, which can seem like a vague, gold-plated industry, is laid out explicitly. And the conflict between research analysts and i-bankers, which lies at the heart of this story, is hashed out again and again. The author was a research analyst at a number of big banking firms, and he both witnessed and was subject to pressures from i-bankers to influence supposedly independent research.

Like so many nonfiction books, though, let the reader beware: the author has an ax to grind. If we're to believe him, he was one of the lone holdouts against an increasingly corrupt business model, and suffered for his nonconformity. It's not necessarily easy to believe that he could always keep his head above the waters of poor ethics, but as he's our narrator, we have to accept his point of view.

Recommended? If you're at all interested in that period of history as it pertains to the market, then yes. It's not a tough read.