Customer Reviews

Leg the Spread: A Woman's Adventures Inside the Trillion-Dollar Boys Club of Commodities Trading

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Does anyone else out there like to read about other people's jobs? Even though I don't particularly want to be a clerk or a trader in Chicago or New York, it was fascinating to read about it. Cari Lynn's story of her two years as a clerk in an aggressively masculine job is easy to read, a result of her background and years of experience as a journalist. She describes how she got the job, how she learned to do the job, and the day-to-day routine of the work.

She really gets going when she describes some of the characters she got to know. One of my favorites is the eccentric Alice, who trades all morning at home, then holds court all afternoon at the dining room at the Board of Trade. Knowledgable in many subjects, she is obsessed with trading and tremendously successful at it. Cari Lynn learns a lot from her.

You can learn a lot of terminology and ins and outs of the trade from this book, or just skim the more technical parts and enjoy the atmosphere and the unbelievable tales of what goes on inside as millions of dollars change hands, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by accident.

Leg the Spread reminds me of several other recent "on the job" books I've enjoyed: Richard Yancey's Confessions of a Tax Collector and Zac Unger's Working Fire.

A disappointing book. The author clerked at the CME for two years, and "Leg the Spread" is a quasi-memoir, although it's mostly a grab-bag of anecdotes and life stories of Merc traders and clerks she got to know. The book is too pedestrian to be "literature" but insufficiently trashy/raunchy to be a guilty pleasure

A third of the characters are male, and they're uninteresting, both in real life and in the book. Frat boy hijinks, "$20,000 if you can eat 50 McNuggets", fast money, fast cars and fast women, fistfights in the pits, drug/alcohol burnouts, financial blowups, yada yada yada. The women characters are portrayed more sympathetically by the author, but even their stories are mostly cartoonish and uninvolving. A shapely clerk tells her boss, "Give me a trading badge, or I'll call you wife and tell her about us." Another clerk is pushed to her death from a rooftop because she "knew too much" about prearranged trades on the floor

Lamentably, there's plenty of wide-eyed "so much money changing hands so fast!!" sprinkled through the book, and the author has the irritating habit of capitalizing words such as Market, Floor, Open and Close, as if the were proper nouns

The best 10- 20 pages of the book are about Bev Gelman, purportedly the largest local in backmonth Euros, earning >$10m/year, and thereby the most successful woman floortrader in history. In her description of Ms Gelman's trading, though she doesn't understand the details of the spreads & strips being traded, the author comes close to grasping what trading is really about, ie having the brains and guts and conviction to come into a market where "everyone" in the pit is 1-bid/3-offer, and deciding to be either 2-bid or 2-offer, for better or worse

Unaccountably "Leg the Spread" is >300 pages. But even if the gist of it were boiled down to 50- 100 pages I can't recommend it

Well, I know nothing about trading, so I can't claim that I know everything she says is true, but one thing IS true: it's a fascinating read! Rarely have I been this sucked into a book which is a riveting account (one woman's account, true) of trading pits at the Merc. I had no idea about all the various pits, seeming randomness of the ups and downs of the markets and all the tremendous egos that come to play in this high testoterone filled environment. I think the author does a terrific job of capturing the men's club atmosphere at the Merc. I have no doubt that her view is true to form. The reviewer who criticizes her is probably one of the louts she describes. The sad part of the book is that these people are addicted to trading, but they don't seem to enjoy the money itself, just the process of winning it. I guess trading is an addiction like any other that provides thrills and dramatic turns, but the depressing part is that it sucks the heart out of you. Near the end of the book, Lynn describes a YOUNG group of traders who came from working class backgrounds and were actually enjoying themselves and their money, but it is clear that in 20 years, they'll be the same rude, fat, balding, bitter men that make up most of the upper level traders. This book made me want to learn a lot more about trading and the pits -- I envy the author for seeing all this firsthand but being able to escape unscathed, unlike many in the book who were not as lucky.

I never thought I'd be interested in commodities trading, but Leg the Spread really brought me into this crazy, high-stakes world that I knew nothing about, but found absolutely fascinating. Lynn is a very gifted writer, and her book opened a window into a whole new world for me. If you liked "Liar's Poker" you'll really like this book!

I was so excited to read this book. What I thought was to be a total expose of life inside the Merc. And here was a woman who walked in, understood it all, and wrote a book about it. Although the author does a pretty good job in describing the many eccentric characters that make up the Merc trading floors, she never actually does any trading herself. She basically hangs out to pick up the local gossip. This was the most disappointing aspect of the book. I was hoping for more of an inside perspective than what the author was actually able to give. She basically admits that because she is a journalist, she knows she would be a bad trader.
Never the less, it's entertaining reading while on the train or at the beach. The characters never bore you and most likely you have seen some of these people on the street or at the latest trendy club.

This recounts amazing stories about the ups and downs of women traders in the male dominated field of pit trading. It is extremely exciting and is hard to put down until the end. The author has a skill for keeping you in tune with the fasnitating stories she shares. You must read this book, and I guarantee you will recommend it to everyone you know.

Not sure if the first reviewer really read the book from cover to cover, or just dipped in and out, but I can honestly say that this is a great read for anyone who knows about the markets and how they work or those who know nothing. It's a real education and from my own experiences of being around traders, this gives a pretty accurate account of life on the floor. Very entertaining and just a good book!

Having been on the floors of the Chicago Board of Trade and the CBOE, and after working for many years in the "upstairs" OTC trading rooms of several brokerage firms, I can tell you that Cari Lynn has captured the essence of the trader mentality. While she may have been merely a clerk, or just an observer, she conveys the sense of things so well that I could barely pull my nose out of her book. It gave me the same rush that being right on a trade used to when I was making markets, and I've recommended it to all my former female compatriots. Believe me, we all endured the same crudities of male traders that she describes, and learned to give as well back in order to survive.

This book is the perfect combination of beginners trade manual and sociological study that captures the essence of a sub-culture most people in the non-trading world have never experienced. I appreciated how Cari Lynn brought in multiple perspectives (male and female, young and old, experienced and inexperienced, "retired" and those still in the "pits") to present as unbiased a picture of the culture of trading as possible. Cari Lynn's fascination with the trading lifestyle (highlighting the drive for money, risk taking, and power at the expense of peace of mind, contentment and happiness) combined with her obvious expertise as a journalist make this a must read for anyone wanting to learn more about another profession, especially one that appears glamourous to some of us in less-profitable professions!

This book is engaging - it is a mostly humorous account of life in the pits. It portrays the glamour of this profession and the quirkiness of its people (both male and female). In a few years all that will be left are the movies, books and memories. Cari Lynn has captured this world very well. Having learned about financial markets on the job, I wish I had read this book and its explanations of key terminology and theories years ago.