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Street Freak: A Memoir of Money and Madness, by Jared Dillian
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When Jared Dillian joined Lehman Brothers in 2001, he fulfilled a life-long dream to make it on Wall Street–but he had no idea how close to the edge the job would take him. Like Michael Lewis' classic Liar's Poker, Jared Dillian's Street Freak takes readers behind the scenes of the legendary Lehman Brothers, exposing its outrageous and often hilarious corporate culture. In this ultracompetitive Ivy League world where men would flip over each other’s ties to check out the labels, Dillian was an outsider as an ex-military, working-class guy in a Men's Wearhouse suit. But he was scrappy and determined; in interviews he told potential managers that, "Nobody can work harder than me. Nobody is willing to put in the hours I will put in. I am insane." As it turned out, on Wall Street insanity is not an undesirable quality. Dillian rose from green associate, checking IDs at the entrance to the trading floor in the paranoid days following 9/11, to become an integral part of Lehman's culture in its final years as the firm's head Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) trader. More than $1 trillion in wealth passed through his hands, but at the cost of an untold number of smashed telephones and tape dispensers. Over time, the exhilarating and explosively stressful job took its toll on him. The extreme highs and lows of the trading floor masked and exacerbated the symptoms of Dillian's undiagnosed bipolar and obsessive compulsive disorders, leading to a downward spiral that eventually landed him in a psychiatric ward. Dillian put his life back together, returning to work healthier than ever before, but Lehman itself had seemingly gone mad, having made outrageous bets on commercial real estate, and was quickly headed for self-destruction. A raucous account of the final years of Lehman Brothers, from 9/11 at its World Financial Center offices through the firm's bankruptcy, including vivid portraits of trading-floor culture, the financial meltdown, and the company's ultimate collapse.
- Sales Rank: #3999015 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-19
- Formats: Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.75" h x .50" w x 5.25" l,
- Running time: 13 Hours
- Binding: MP3 CD
Review
“[A] disturbingly candid memoir . . . the highly personal journal of a poor kid who quit the U.S. Coast Guard to chase his dream of becoming a trader. . . . His narrative crackles with authenticity . . . the dominant tone is unsparingly confessional and even modest. Dillian’s snail’s-eye view is what makes his book a valuable companion to previous volumes on Lehman. . . . From hair-trigger decisions to trashy banter, Dillian captures how the market feels from inside the belly of a trading room. . . . [A] blunt and sometimes hilarious account.” —Bloomberg
“This revealing, personal memoir of a volatile period in the dual lives of a big-time trader and the fallen American giant Lehman Brothers is depicted in the fueled words of Dillian, a major figure at the company. . . .Writ[ing] in a style that veers from gonzo lucidity to precise trader chatter . . . Dillian offers a candid look at the demise of a corporate behemoth.” —Publishers Weekly
“Thank God for the 3rd element, because if it wasn’t for lithium Jared Dillian might still be in the psych ward looking for his shoelaces. Instead, we get Street Freak, the best Wall Street memoir in a bunch of years. This guy can really f***ing write. Street Freak is more than just a great read, though. For anybody who’s ever gone off the rails, or thought they might, it’s a comforting reminder that there’s always a way back.” —John Rolfe, coauthor of Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle
“Always vivid, by turns hilarious and sad, this is an electrifying memoir about not only money and madness, but the madness of money. It left me wondering yet again about the shifting boundaries between sanity and insanity.” —Siri Hustvedt, author of The Summer Without Men
“A scathing critique of selfish, scrambling men so driven to earn a buck that they lose all sight of the world beyond the tickers. . . . Dillian hardly fit the mold of the rich, Northeastern prep-schooler, and his outsider status served as a great attribute, offering him a clearer view of an industry both morally and economically bankrupt.” —Kirkus Reviews
"A bipolar math whiz [and] amusingly caustic writer whose new memoir pulls no punches about a financial career that nearly cost him both his sanity and his life." —Fortune.com
About the Author
Jared Dillian is the founder of the subscription-based daily financial market report The Daily Dirtnap. He was a trader for Lehman Brothers from 2001 to 2008. He lives in South Carolina.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PROLOGUE
Portrait of a Trader October 2, 2007
Back in 1999, when the world was brimming with optimism, when there were purple Yahoo! taxicabs patrolling the streets of San Francisco, I was a clerk on the options trading floor of the Pacific Coast Options Exchange. It was there that I learned how the financial markets worked. I spent much of my time standing in the back of the Intel-Oracle pit with the other clerks and stock jockeys; that is, the area where traders in Intel and Oracle options congregated.
There was a trader in the pit named Jack Taylor. Jack was six four, 240 pounds, with no concept of personal space. He spent half his day in a personal fast market, almost as though he was on crack, trading everything in sight: “BUY YOUR BOOK, JAN 30 CALLS, 20 LOT! SELL YOUR BOOK, DEC 25 PUTS! SAGEOLA! SAGEAROONI!” He was all arms and legs, thrashing his crumpled-up risk reports, crashing into other traders in the pit, eating lobster and steak burritos, passing gas all over the rest of the crowd, and heading out back to have sex with one of the female exchange clerks behind the Dumpster.
I wanted to be like Jack.
I wanted to be like Jack because he seemed to be one of God’s simplest and most beautiful creations. Make money, good. Lose money, bad. Burrito, good. Hangover, bad. My life seemed terribly complicated, and if I could boil down my existence to this primordial level, then it would be an existentially freeing experience.
But I was wrong. Jack’s wild personality was a smoke screen, a defense mechanism that he had created to convince other people (and perhaps himself, too) that his life really was that uncomplicated. He was not a simple guy but a rather complex one: a smart kid who had graduated from an Ivy League school, who had made deliberate and rational choices about what to do with his life, and who was now having second thoughts. His acting out was his way of coping, his way of distracting himself from the reality that the financial markets are a cruel way to make a living.
Jack now owns a sandwich shop in Chicago: Jack’s Sandos.
All traders go through what Jack went through. They learn to cope with the idea that they are expendable. If you ever take a trip to an investment bank’s trading floor, look around. Try to find the rare and elusive silver fox. Try to count the number of traders over forty. You won’t find many.
Partly this is because of mathematics. If the markets are mostly a zero-sum game, then the winners stick around and the losers find other things to do with their lives. The likelihood of somebody lasting ten years is only about one in five hundred.
The bigger reason that you don’t see old farts on trading floors is because people self-select. After a number of years in the business, they say enough is enough, hand in their company ID, and they go raise alpacas outside of Spokane.
The important detail is that all traders are capitalists of one stripe or another. Some of them are even supercapitalists, staunch libertarians, politically well to the right of even the Republican Party. And capitalism requires a dedication to the pursuit of reality. A rock is a rock is a rock. A rock is not a tree, no matter what mental gymnastics you perform. Profits are profits. Losses are losses. And there is no evading losses. You see your P&L every day, and the negative number stares you in the face.
Back in the civilian world, people permit themselves to evade reality. If the market is down, they won’t open the brokerage statement. They will stop investing. They will give up. They will hope that things come back.
Being a professional trader allows no such evasion. Hope is not a strategy. If you have a loss, you had better figure it out, or you are out on your ass.
That is a hell of a way to live.
But only if you can get to work in the morning. Seven years of this.
I’m late. Again. Did I lock the front door?
If you’re a trader, it is important to exercise the illusion of control, because the reality is that you’re not in control of anything. The smartest man on Wall Street, after months and months of research on a single trade, has no control over the outcome. In the short term, his position can move against him and force him to liquidate the world’s best idea, only to make him watch as it appreciates 200 percent over the next six months.
I definitely turned the coffeemaker off. But I’m not sure I locked the front door.
Traders deal with probabilities. There is a probability distribution for interest rates, for the log return of stock prices, and for cheating on your spouse without getting caught. The world is filled with uncertainty, and you try to model it. You quantify it. I model the likelihood that someone will break into my house if I forget to lock the door, and I determine that it is infinitesimally small. But not small enough.
I’d better turn around and check the front door.
It is true that in the absence of trade, there is war. But trade is just a different kind of warfare: buyers continually demand lower prices, and sellers want more for what they’re selling. A transaction occurs when—for a brief moment in time—buyer and seller can agree on a price. You’d think that both parties would be satisfied at this point, but in practice, they’re more pissed off at each other than they were before. Everyone thinks he’s getting screwed. A trading floor is filled with unhappy people, because nobody is ever satisfied.
Okay. Here we go.
Unlock, unlock.
Step outside. Turn around.
Lock dead bolt. Test doorknob. Push against door. Feel that it’s locked.
Lock doorknob.
Lock dead bolt again. Five, four, three, two, one.
Lock door again. Five, four, three, two, one.
Lock dead bolt again. Three, two, one.
Lock door again. Three, two, one.
Lock dead bolt again.
Lock door again.
Jiggle doorknob. Locked. Five, three, one. Five, three, one.
In most of the world’s markets, prices are sticky. The price of milk does not change on a second-by-second basis. It does not tick. Neither do the prices of air conditioners, coffeemakers, or MP3s. But a share of GE stock is worth more than it was just a second ago. In the financial markets, quoted prices are good for an instant; after that, they’re stale. Numbers change, and there are consequences. People start yelling. In fact, traders yell all the time. Sometimes it’s because they’re angry with you, but mostly it is to convey a sense of urgency. Five bid for ten thousand, immediate. Higher, now! I’ve seen kids out of college who were completely unprepared for the brutality of trading. Someone yells, and they crumble. They literally shake. Trading is not for the weak, the indecisive, the passive, or the homeschooled.
Damn it.
Back to the house, all the way from the bus stop.
Forgot to check the refrigerator.
This is madness. The madness. It’s back again, isn’t it?
Intimidation, I found, works pretty well, but only to a point. It can get you the extra penny, the balance of the order, and the price adjustment. But it is not a necessary or even sufficient condition for success. There is the guy in the pit with the glasses that nobody pays attention to. He buys when other people are selling. He steps aside when a big order comes through. He’s cordial. He keeps up appearances, but it is impossible to tell if he is having a good day or a bad day. It is impossible to tell if he is having a good year or a bad year.
He is having a very good year. He is up $3 million.
The refrigerator’s closed.
Back upstairs.
I can’t stand this.
Windows. Bathroom windows, office windows, bedroom windows.
Computer off, printer off.
Concentrate.
Coffeemaker off. Lights off.
Porch windows.
Ready.
It is more important to be smart than it is to be big, or fast, or a jerk. And on Wall Street, there are all kinds of smart. There are mathematicians, people who can find the flaws in Nobel Prize–winning options pricing models. There are computer geeks. There are poker players. There are the social psychologists, like me, who know that human behavior runs in patterns over time. Any or all of them can get rich. The people who don’t are the people who don’t ask questions, the people who consider it a birthright to act as a tollbooth attendant, taking their nickel from the market, not a care in the world.
Different pattern this time. Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
Lock door.
Lock dead bolt.
Jiggle doorknob. Locked. Nine, five, one. Nine, five, one.
Remember that. And catch your bus.
This is a choice. You can choose not to do this.
There are those who think it is terribly unproductive to have an entire class of people dedicated to buying and selling money. They say that buying and selling money doesn’t actually produce anything. It’s just moving wealth around from one pile to the next. Even if that were true, it doesn’t mean that anyone should care: to most people, making money is an end in itself. There are those, however, who spend their entire career on Wall Street and can’t explain what it is they do for a living when they go home to their children at night. They’re embarrassed for themselves, because they feel that they’re not a force for good in the world.
To me, making money was an end in itself. But beyond that, it is important for any economy to have deep, liquid capital markets. Lost in the debate about the credit crisis—about whether or not it was good for banks to be lending money to people who would have great difficulty paying it back—is the concept that these people, for the first time, had access to capital. Without the existence of capital markets, wit...
Most helpful customer reviews
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
The first honest Wall st memoir
By JGLOW
This book is a gloves off, brutally honest account of what life is like working on Wall St. Dillian nails it by not hiding a thing about his experience and being brave enough to tell the world his perspective from the "dark side." Anyone who has worked in a sales or trading function, buy or sell side, will appreciate reading this piece. In addition, if you have no connection with Wall St other than the picture that politicians have painted by berating the group, I think this book will help shape your opinion. There is a lot of baggage that comes along with working on the Street that most people are not fully aware of and Street Freak gets to the heart of many of these conflicts.
I like to think of Dillian as the next Michael Lewis with a sprinkle of Bret Easton Ellis: Liar's Poker meets American Psycho.
Hats off to him for having the balls to say how he really feels!
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
The best account in fiction or non-fiction of the mind of a trader
By Aaron C. Brown
This is an extraordinary account of what it feels like to trade--and a book with the literary merit to electrify readers with no interest in Wall Street. Most books by traders, such as Victor Niederhoffer, Nassim Taleb or George Soros, filter the raw mental processes through a layer of rationalization. The authors want to impress you with their intelligence, not let you see their inner demons. Dillian is unfilted. Readers should be warned that means lots of farts, snot, bruises, vomit and other impolite things, and this in a book without a trace of grit. We never feel or smell these things, they are like crude graffiti neatly written on the wall of an antiseptic bathroom. Virtually every character (definitely including the author) is insulted and demeaned in ways that are highly incorrect politically. His customers are dirty, douchebags, hicks, slow or dozens of other bad things, never anything good. His coworkers are 95 percent bad things, 5 percent good (but only briefly).
Women, in particular, incite a constant obsessive objectification--and this in a book with absolutely zero sex. The only two women in the book who do anything other than provide a show for junior high school level crude lewdness, are his two psychiatrists who are described only as the "Russian model" and "startlingly attractive". Two words each for the medical professionals who saved his sanity, and only about appearance. His wife is barely in the story, except for a very crude sexual slur by another trader. The electric fan story is sufficient grounds for a sexual harassment suit. But it's not only women. Race, sexual orientation, class, ethnicity, weight, taste in music or clothes and anything else is grist for unpleasant smears.
However, this is not a crude rant, it is a Tourette Syndrome release of tension that is very common among traders. I have never seen it captured on paper like this. Polite authors pretend it doesn't exist, superficial ones treat it as a humorous foible. No one else, as far as I know, has had the honesty, writing talent and courage to expose it in himself. You don't understand traders if you don't understand their need to short-circuit the part of the brain that censors inappropriate behavior.
This book is not an insightful account of mental illness. For most of the book, the author acts like a "seami alki," that is an alcoholic with self-esteem and anger management issues, a combination sufficiently common among traders to require a slang term. His struggles with bipolar and obsessive-compulsive issues are treated matter-of-factly, accurate without being revealing. In fact, Dillian's clinical issues may mislead readers into treating his account as an unusual one. You don't need to be crazy to act like a trader.
The book is also not a useful account of how Wall Street works or why Lehman Brothers failed. The author's understanding of these things is about the level of fulminating editorials by people with no experience in finance. By tradition, it takes thriving through three complete market cycles to acquire trading wisdom. The author made it only though half of one cycle, and the upswing half which is less educational than the downswing. He is like a race car driver who knows little about automotive engineering, physics or how NASCAR makes money. He doesn't have to know those things to drive, he needs only practical intuition, and his ignorance makes his descriptions of the thrills of racing more honest because it's not filtered through what he learned from books.
Unfortunately, the book could perpetuate some false beliefs. There is no positive mention of risk management in this book. The author seems to trade whatever he likes, for whatever reasons he like, in whatever size he likes, without oversight or coaching. Now Lehman had some risk management issues, but letting junior traders run wild was not one of them. Lehman actually had very good trading floor risk management, better than many other firms. Dillian implies that if you made money you were a hero, however many rules you broke. This is definitely not true. Making money was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of success. The firm required consistent, explainable profits from risk-controlled strategies (on the trading floor, but unfortunately not in every department).
Both the firm and the economic environment conspired to disguise any capital or funding constraint on trading, and the author dealt only in liquid, exchange-traded securities. Lehman's middle and back offices took care of much of the plumbing. This makes his experience somewhat narrow. It's not inaccurate, but it's only part of the story.
So read this book to understand what a trader does, and how he does it, and how he feels about doing it. Do not read it for deep understanding of either finance or mental illness. Read it for the pleasure of an exceptional writer tackling an important profession with breathtaking skill, courage and honesty. But don't believe any of it, except the feel.
28 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
A blow-your-brains take on what it's really like to trade
By M. Park
Street Freak doesn't just put you in the Aeron chair of a single trader making markets in every ETF under the sun. It goes beyond the cologne, the order-in sandwiches and flatulence of the Lehman trading floor and puts you deep inside the brain of Jared Dillian--a "poor, smart and determined" Wall Street outsider with an undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
The characters are real and the trades are real. A department head is "a walking molecule of testosterone... who patrolled the aisles, rotating his shoulders and practically his entire torso just to tell people to go f--- themselves." And Jared recounts some of his biggest winning and losing trades with play-by-play accuracy.
While has-been traders like this reviewer will jaw-drop at how Jared literally moved markets on the "Street," it's the dark and deeply personal episodes of the "Freak" that make this a special read. Jared was a great trader, but luckily for us he's an even better writer.
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