Rating: 
Summary: Best ever
Review: Still the best book on finance ever written. Others have tried to copy but none has come close to the original. A must read book for everyone interested in Finance and making a career on Wall Street.
Rating:
Summary: Great characters; great trading; great story.
Review: This book is to Wall Street as Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential" is to the restaurant business. It's an inside look from someone who not only was there, but lived to write the tale. It's easy to identify with Lewis, who begins his story while he's interviewing for jobs in college. One thing leads to another and he's soon making money and (mis?)-handling millions for his customers and earning the reputation of a "Big Swinging Dick" at Solomon.Lewis provides great insight into the bond trader's mindset, ranging from the abuse of interns to the creativity required to create a mortgage bond after-market through internal politics and external sales. The traders are continuously glancing at the financial numbers and running "what if" scenarios, imagining the impact on the bond market. The details of the instruments being traded are very well explained, even in financially complex configurations like tranched mortgage liabilities or stripped bonds. Just as much attention to detail is provided in descriptions of the paranoid manic-depressive tendencies of the traders on both the buy and sell sides. Lewis's first "exploding" customer provides a particularly poignant contrast to the equally risky goings on within Solomon. Lewis really moves the story along. He has a sure hand with dialog and scene setting, and the first person point of view adds to the tension. Thankfully, "Liar's Poker" doesn't get bogged down in psychological or social criticism; there's not even any Monday morning quarter-backing by the author-protagonist. The story is told and the interpretation is pretty much left up to the reader, which I find refreshing. I also really enjoyed Lewis's tale of Silicon Valley VC through the eyes of Jim Clark, founder of SGI and Netscape, in "The New New Thing". I'm afraid I just wasn't buying Lewis's more recent "Faster", which is much more analytical and much less (auto)biographical.
Rating: 
Summary: for the new bie
Review: returns returns and returns this is a must not to buy too many stories and returns
Rating: 
Summary: Too Narrow
Review: I have read a good number of books covering Wall Street in the 80's and I really think there are better books out there, Den of Thief's, Predators Ball. This book is entertaining, well written, and gives us a view we normally do not have, the traders. With the movies Boiler Room and Rogue Trader, you can see that they take from this book. I think the best part of the book is the behind the scenes, almost sub plot story of Salomon Brothers and Wall Street in the eighties.
The down side for me is that this book really just focuses on a small part of the whole 80's Wall Street, Junk Bond and M&A world. I would have liked him to have tried to captures so of the other things going on in his business t the same time and try and relate them to what he was doing. The ending is also about 10 pages too long. Overall this is an average book.
Rating: 
Summary: The Money Pit
Review: If he didn't describe it with such wry, amused detachment, Michael Lewis' chronicle of his time at Salomon Brothers during the 1980s could easily be mistaken for a modern installment of Dante's inferno. Each day on the trading floor, as computers blinked and eager brokers barked into the phone, bright young people yielded to siren call of greed. Personal destruction was the goal of the game, as Darwinism ran rampant and the strong metaphorically devoured the weak as a matter of course. Somehow Lewis avoids turning this often disturbing display of human baseness into a morality play. His sense of humor is most likely what allowed to him survive, and even succeed, during his time in the lion's den. In "Liar's Poker", he uses it to great effect, painting vivid portraits of the colorfully flawed egoists who drove the bond market into excess and chaos. For all their blustering, Lewis reveals many of the redoubtable players in the bond game to be sad and insecure, and avoids the temptation to pass judgement on them. It's no wonder that Lewis finally answered his calling in journalism, because he displays amazing skill here, and not only as a writer and observer of the human condition. He's equally adept at ferreting out facts, analyzing them, and presenting them to lay readers in an entirely comprehensible way. In the course of his rollicking story, he manages to deliver a pretty detailed lesson on the basics of finance, the bond market, and the ways it impacts our daily lives. As a neophyte himself when he went into investment banking, Lewis seems to tutor the reader even as he's learning some of the basics himself. He explains how the bond market drama of the eighties began with the adoption of a new operating system by the fed, targeting money supply growth instead of interest rates. This caused bond prices to swing wildly and created a window of opportunity for traders in the heretofore backwater bond market to reap huge sums in arbitrage. At the same time, consumer and government debt skyrocketed, creating a enormous demand for fixed income products. Many of the big shots, "or "Big Swinging...", as Lewis often
refers to them, happened to be in the right place at the right time. Luck definitely played a large part in making many of them legends. As for Lewis himself, he emerges as one of the luckiest of all, escaping with a rich experience, the material for a terrific book, and maybe even his soul.
Rating:
Summary: Very well done
Review: Speaking as a Los Angeles Economics student I found the book to be a highly entertaining, refreshingly interesting, delightful tour through the day-to-day activities of what was at one point the world's premier investment firm. Mr. Lewis provides a fascinating insider's look at the bond markets and the leveraged buyouts that made the period famous. Highly recommended for anyone tired of stultifying economics textbooks.
Rating:
Summary: down with wall street, up with milken
Review: ... A refreshing look at the investment banking world of the early 80's, when the masters of the universe lorded over all they surveyed (in their own minds anyway). This book was one of the earliest to roll back the canopy of secrecy and respectability, revealing Wall Street at its heart: a bunch of thuggish suits with ivy league degrees, endlessly looking for new and creative ways to legally mug their clients. Though the book is old, the flavor and rhythms are timeless- it's the same old street. Because Lewis writes dispassionately and objectively, his words hit home all the more. He comes across as a very good storyteller, not much more or less. In my earlier days of getting acquainted with the markets I often wondered how investment banks could hire rooms full of "traders" and have most of those traders be profitable. If trading requires a special talent or mindset, which it definitely does, how is it that all these ivy league guys can be good at trading en masse, especially when they have zero patience and huge egos? The answer is that 95% of the "traders" in the employ of a large investment bank are not trading in the real sense at all. They are either siphoning money from unwitting customers with the help of product pushing salesmen (no different than run of the mill retail brokers, except higher class) or else they are taking a bite out of the bid/ask spread, which is what most floor traders do- they act as slippage extractors, so that the skid you see between your order price and your fill price is what goes in their pocket. This is trading only in a nominal sense, because you are not actually competing with other traders when you do this - you are taking advantage of an engineered market that is geared in your favor. No different than if I sold you high priced potato chips and made sure to grab a big handful myself before handing over the bag. Surprisingly, Michael Milken was one of the few who came out of this book looking like a winner. The rest of the world wrote Milken off as a crook without actually looking into what he did or how he made a fortune. Lewis gives a clear and lucid explanation of Milken's idea- that the investment world as a whole had its credit rating system upside down due to a skewed perspective of corporate credit risk- and tracks in detail how Milken was able to leverage this single idea with a sheer force of will into billions of dollars in junk bond profits. As a side note, even after reading "Den of Thieves" (an excellent book that chronicles Milken's ultimate fall), I still think that Mike got the short end of the stick- painted as a crook because he was greedy and made a lot of money, rather than any truly harmful wrongdoing. The massive contribution Milken made to the capital markets was to reshape the assessment of credit overall, increasing the efficiency of capital deployment across the globe- worth hundreds of times more than his payout in the long run. This surely gives him claim to a better reputation than the one he's gotten from the press. But he's still a billionaire living in Lake Tahoe, so you can't shed too many tears. If you read this book and enjoy it, you might want to note that the 1990's successor to Liar's Poker is "Fiasco: Blood in the water on Wall Street," also written by a bond insider whose moral qualms eventually force him to give up his Wall Street ways.
Rating:
Summary: Lewis' Best
Review: Michael Lewis was still a bond salesman at Solomon Brothers when he began writing Liar's Poker, and it is obvious that he was right in the middle of the action this book discusses. The book is set in the frenzied 1980's when bond traders were raking in millions of dollars a year and were at the top of the investment banking-heap. It is a wild world where unbelieveably confident, ambitious, and greedy men put their all (their money, time, and energy--all of which they have in large reserves)into making more money than anyone else in their firm and any other firm on Wall Street. Lewis is always funny and a very careful observer of the world which he describes, so this is a wonderful insider's perspective of a fascinating career. It really makes investment banking come alive, does a wonderful job explaining complicated financial matter, and though it is non-fiction all of the outlandish characters make it a very entertaining read. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in finance or who just want to read a very well written, fun book about "the real world."
Rating:
Summary: One of those must have books about the 80's market
Review: This is one of those excellent books that you should read for the following reasons: 1. Everyone else has read it, so they will sprinkle their narratives with examples from it. 2. Is funny, wonderfully engrossing biography of Lewis's life at the company Solman Brothers. 3. You'll slice thru this book like a stick of warm butter. Just one of those books that you read in one or two sittings.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious!
Review: One of my favorite books. Hilarious! A must read for any I-banker or I-banker wanna-be.
| 
