Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst

January 2, 2006
When retired telecommunications analyst Dan Reingold decided to write an account of what he'd seen while working for powerful Wall Street investment banks, he turned to his niece, a journalist at Fast Company
and the author of Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed and the Fall of Arthur Anderson
, for help. Together, they've created a solid structure for his recollections of life in the trenches, but because he's one of the good guys, Reingold doesn't have much to confess. Beyond detailing every step in his upward career mobility, Reingold does little but gripe about people like his main competitor, Jack Grubman, who spent years flaunting insider connections with executives who would float him advance info on major corporate deals. (Grubman is currently a defendant in several securities fraud cases.) Reingold does suggest that insider influence is so pervasive in the financial market that investors should avoid individual stocks completely, and he has a number of recommendations for industry-wide reform, but in the end, his story is basically that he worked in the same industry as a bunch of bad eggs. While the personal material is never less than engaging, it doesn't fundamentally alter our understanding of the recent market scandals.

Starred review from January 15, 2006
One of the top research analysts in the country, Dan Reingold (project director, Telecom Finance, Inst. for Tele-Information, Columbia Business Sch.) was employed by Wall Street firms Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse First Boston from 1989 to 2003. Now, with Jennifer Reingold (Fast Company magazine; coauthor, with Barbara Ley Toffler, Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed, and the Fall of Arthur Andersen), he takes a probing look back at the burgeoning telecom industry of that period, during which he was earning more money than he ever dreamed possible. It's a terrific memoir filled with funny anecdotes and sagas of unethical behavior and staggering corporate losses. The cast of characters includes Bernie Ebbers, Frank Quattrone, and Jack Grubman, who all soared through the Wall Street sky only to crash and burn. While there have been other recent Wall Street insider accounts of the rarified lives of analysts, notably Andy Kessler's Wall Street Meat, Reingold is especially knowledgeable about the nuts and bolts of being a research analyst, as well as the -telecom bubble - and his role in it. His closing suggestions on how best to reform the practice of research analysis on Wall Street bears closer scrutiny; his claims that the regulators (notably the SEC) were basically asleep at the wheel, allowing criminal activity to happen, is damning. This honest and irreverent behind-the-scenes account of life on Wall Street is highly recommended for public libraries and larger business collections." -Richard Drezen, Washington Post/New York City Bureau, New York"

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