num_pages: 320
description: New York Times BestsellerThe Buy Side by former Galleon Group trader Turney Duff portrays an after-hours Wall Street culture where drugs and sex are rampant and billions in trading commissions flow to those who dangle the most enticements. A remarkable writing debut filled with indelible moments The Buy Side shows as no book ever has the rewards  and dizzying temptations  of making a living on the Street. Growing up in the 1980s Turney Duff was your average kid from Kennebunk Maine eager to expand his horizons. After trying  and failing  to land a job as a journalist he secured a trainee position at Morgan Stanley and got his first feel for the pecking order that exists in the trading pits. Those on the buy side the traders who make large bets on whether a stock will rise or fall are the alphas and those on the sell side the brokers who handle their business are eager to please. How eager to please was brought home stunningly to Turney in 1999 when he arrived at the Galleon Group a colossal hedge-fund management firm run by secretive founder Raj Rajaratnam. Finally in a position to trade on his own Turney was encouraged to socialize with the sell side and siphon from his new broker friends as much information as possible. Soon he was not just vacuuming up valuable tips but also being lured into a variety of hedonistic pursuits. Nave enough to believe he could keep up the lifestyle without paying a price he managed to keep an eye on his buy-and-sell charts and meanwhile pondered the strange goings on at Galleon where tens of millions were being made each week in sometimes mysterious ways. At his next positions at Argus Partners and J.L. Berkowitz Turney climbed to even higher heights  and as it turned out plummeted to even lower depths  as by day he solidified his reputation one of the Streets most powerful healthcare traders and by night he blazed a path through the citys nightclubs showing off his social genius and voraciously inhaling any drug that would fill the void he felt inside. A mesmerizingly immersive journey through Wall Streets first millennial decade and a poignant self portrait by a young man who surely would have destroyed himself were it not for his decision to walk away from a seven-figure annual income The Buy Side is one of the best coming-of-age-on-the-Street books ever written.
language: English
title: The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess
publisher: Crown Business