A Trader's View of Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers
Jared Dillian's Street Freak
Jared Dillian’s Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers has the energy and tension of a great book on sports, the erudition of a B-school course on trading and the politesse of a lap dancer hurling expletives at the customers. It’s a helluva hilarious, as well as moving, book.
It took less than a decade for Dillian – ex-Coast Guard, ex-working class – to become head ETF trader in the Ivy League world of Lehman Brothers. More than $1 trillion in wealth passed through his hands. The extreme swings of the trading floor, however, masked and fed the symptoms of his undiagnosed bipolar and obsessive compulsive disorders. Dillian writes openly and tellingly about his suicide attempt and how he landed in a psych ward. When he came back "healthy" (and medicated) to Lehman Brothers, Dillian saw that it was the company itself that was now going mad, with outrageous investments.
Dillian describes
Lehman’s final years, from 9/11 (the day Dillian was to receive his assignment at Lehman in the World Financial Center, across from 1 World Trade Center) to the firm’s
bankruptcy. “Lehman Brothers was too small to be an investment bank and too large to be an insane asylum,” he writes.
The book is much as Dillian describes himself: thoughtful yet aggressive, intellectual yet vulgar. It provides fabulous and profanity rich insights not just into the trading floor culture but the trader personality; this is a book no young trader should let his mother read. Dillian makes you understand why, like himself, the trader usually retires after 10 years on the trading floor to a place like Myrtle Beach, SC, after making his many, many millions. Of course, with the collapse of Lehman, Dillian lost many of those millions.
Dillian now writes a $600/year The Daily Dirtnap, an apparently entertaining as well as insightful daily financial market report. I can't vouch for the insights, but if it is written anywhere as well as Street Freak, it must be entertaining indeed.
Published September 13, 2011. Click here to buy at amazon.com.