Customer Reviews

The Wolf of Wall Street

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

I love business/Wall Street books as I work at a regional investment firm. Also, the movie "Boiler Room" is one of my favorites and supposedly this is the firm it was modeled after. Unfortunately this guy tries to be too cute in his writing style and he's not nearly as funny as he thinks. He wants to impress you with his drug use and his wild life and also manages to get in quite a bit about his business. BTW, he does appear to be very talented as a chop shop owner/manager and just from a few tidbits you can see he knows the aggressive sales techniques necessary to be successful. But this book is confusing, boring, too long, and has very few interesting points. The author tells you what he wants you to hear, then gets to the end of the story and runs out of time without completing the full story. For example, after going on forever about his beautiful wife and drug use, after rehab they divorce. But instead of completing the story for full disclosure it's about two pages with no mention of fault or what really happened.

The synopsis of this book is exactly the type book I like: true stories of Wall Street. But this book is hugely disappointing and not worth the time. I'd take a pass on this one as it's not worth the time invested.

"The Wolf of Wall Street" is probably the worst book I've read all year. It consists of non-stop extreme drug use, promiscuous and pornographic sex, money laundering, and stock manipulation, while lacking little or no explanation of how author Jordan Belfort built his firm and worked his financial machinations.

Other sources help fill in the blanks. Belfort's business, according to Business Week, was part of a $10 billion/year business that regulators lagged in controlling. "Chop stocks" (bought at a large discount) made up perhaps half the 1997 85 million-share daily volume of the OTC Bulletin Board, plus dozens of stocks on the NASDAQ Small Cap Market. Belfort would purchase a hidden stake in a relatively new firm that would then issue "letter" stock under Rule 144 of the securities laws, commonplace at many perfectly legitimate companies as a way of rewarding key employees and giving them an equity interest. Letter stock and warrants were also issued to compensate consultants in lieu of cash. And stock issued overseas, under Regulation S of the securities laws, is a widely recognized way of raising capital for emerging companies. Reg. S stock is cheap for a simple reason: Since it cannot be legally traded for two years, it is commonly issued at a steep discount. Rule 144 stock is also cheap because it is usually issued at little or no cost and must be held for one or two years.

Belfort would make large profits by ignoring the law and "laundering" the stocks by selling them long before the two years had expired. If customers were to see the stock (marked "restricted"), they might realize that it's not supposed to be sold to the public. So the chop houses had a simple solution: They didn't show the customers the stock. The shares were only a book entry, and the brokers were reluctant to resell it once bought by a customer. If forced to do so, they would by duping a new customer into purchasing the shares.

Belfort served 22 months in prison and has been banned from the securities industry. His firm was closed in 1996, and he is required to repay $110 million to investors at the rate of 50% of everything he now makes. So far less than $700,000 has been paid.

Did anyone else lose count of how many times Mr. Belfort used the phrase "luscious loamy loins" in this book? The Duchess must have had some interesting private parts if they were indeed "loamy". Hmm.

This memoir is not worth reading unless you were an employee of Stratton Oakmont or had some kind of connection to the people mentioned in it. The book is mostly about Jordan's careless spending, complete disregard for others, and raging drug and prostitute habits. You don't even get the sense that he's remorseful about any of it in the end: it rather seems that Mr. Belfort is boasting about his bad behavior.

The beginning of the book details the rise of Jordan in the broker business and does have some interesting chapters. Then it takes a nose dive and turns into an ego trip down Mr. Belfort's memory lane. It gets painfully boring and quite unbelievable at points: Jordan describes miracle medical cures, his superhuman resistance to deadly doses of various drugs, ridiculous tawdry conversations... It's full of way-out-there stuff that makes you think maybe Jordan imagined these things in his drug-addled mind. Even if some of it is true, it's not very interesting and mostly I just felt embarassed for him and the people whose nasty habits he reveals in this tale.

Save your money, Jordan is a conceited bore.

I bought this book after reading an excerpt printed in Registered Rep magazine. I thought that the book would be built around the rise of the author's business, detailing how he earned his nickname; instead the entire book is based on his fall from greatness, and doesn't recount any of the rise.
I find this ironic in that during the fall the author was supposedly drugged up nearly 24/7 (which is the primary reason for his demise) to the point any other man would have overdosed, yet he depends upon his memory during this drug-induced haze for all of the details of his story.
The Author's Note hits the nail on the head: "...a true story based on my best recollections of various events in my life."
I'm sure there is plenty of truth in the book, but the bottom line is that Jordan Belfort can no longer make money spinning lies in the securities industry, so he is trying to make money spinning lies as an author instead.
If you want to read this book borrow it or buy it used.

I was really looking forward to this book. Unfortunately, it was basically a real disappointment, with very little substance. Belfort spends an enormous amount of time of his obsessions with drugs and prostitutes, and very little on things like:

-how did he start his firm?
-why was the SEC after him?
-what happened to the money?
-what did he go to prison for and what was his life like there?

etc, etc.

Belfort also tends to almost completely ignore the reality; namely, that his firm essentially existed only to rip off the investing public. He then used this money to finance his decadent lifestyle. Nowhere does Belfort show any remorse for this thievery at all. Personally, I think he is a sorry human being with a weak writing style. Don't waste your money on this book!

I wasn't going to write a review, as I felt I already wasted enough of my life reading this pathetic excuse for a book. But since convicted felon Jordan Belfort (who obviously learned very little during his time in jail) has been planting fake glowing reviews, I felt I should warn people who might be tempted to purchase a copy of this piece of garbage (luckily, I read an ARC, so the midget will get no money from me).
Poorly written, badly edited, The Wolf of Wall Street is not only a terrible book, but I'm convinced that, like the positive reviews on Amazon, most of it is a lie. Belfort is the self-appointed Wolf of Wall Street, but if you google his name, you'll come across a CNBC article that says: "Jordan Belfort is the biggest Wall Street crook you've never heard of." At a certain point he says the newspapers humiliated his first wife, portraying her as the older woman who got dumped for the model, but a Nexis search (slow day at work) shows that there are no articles whatsoever covering Jordan Belfort's divorce, or any aspect of his life, until he went to jail. The fact that Belfort thinks he was a star, worthy of the gossip columns, shows you just how delusional the poor guy is.
Belfort wasn't the wolf, or the king, or anything else of Wall Street (well, maybe the midget of Wall Street). Just a drug addict obsessed with money, who thought he was brilliant but was dumb enough to break the law and get caught.

I'm pretty well informed of what goes on in the financial world, so when I heard about this book, I wondered why I'd never heard of Jordan Belfort, Stratton Oakmont, or the "Wolf of Wall Street."

The first few chapters told me why: Belfort, whose ego is inversely proportional to his height (why is it always that the shortest guys have such delusions of grandiosity?), has appointed himself The Wolf of Wall Street, even though the company he operated was a blip in the map of the financial world. The firm wasn't even based in Manhattan and, sorry but you can't be the Wolf (or anything else for that matter) of Wall Street when you are working in a Long Island town most successful Wall Streeters wouldn't step in unless forced at gunpoint. Henry Kravis as the Wolf of Wall Street? That I buy. Jordan Belfort? Give me a break. That's like calling a used-car salesman the Wolf of Detroit.

I sat directly outside "The Brown Midget's" office for over 4 years and saw it all....this book does not tell the true story at all!!! This book was another Belfort rip-off and the next poor victims will be any producer, director actor and THE INNOCENT TICKET PURCHASING MOVIE GOING PUBLIC. This is not the true criminal conman that is Jordan Belfort. "The Little Wuss of Wall Street" would have been more apropos. His real crimes, locations of hidden funds and the countless lives, families, businesses he destroyed across America and abroad are not accurately portrayed in this book. Folks lost their homes, businesses, families, and some even committed suicide. These guys were drug dealers, before they became mobbed up con artists and fraudulent stockbrokers. Both Jordan and his dad suffered from dwarfism since birth and this pretty much explains the Napoleonic complex and perversions that both men shared. The true stories will never be told. Unfortunately, just like the Kennedy's, the sins of the father will be visited on Belfort's children and their children. That's just simple karma! What happened to "omerta"? They each ratted on one another and plenty of others. I read and returned the book so that my money wouldn't go to further drug use and con schemes.

This is a perfect example how a good (perhaps great) mind can be totally distorted by ego. This guy's ego is so much greater than his talent that it's distasteful. The guy's a loser; rich, infamous, but a loser extraordinaire. He's the only one who ever referred to himself as "Wolf". That's probably because he's smaller than most, probably in all his body parts, and tries to compensate by being larger than life in his own mind.

I live in New York and when I was single, I met plenty of guys who worked on Wall Street and who, in order to try to impress me, showed off their money. They failed every time (I found them crass and unattractive) but I quickly realized that, as appalling and tasteless their method was, they couldn't help it: the only thing they had going for themselves was their money.

Jordan Belfort is like those guys: a short and ridiculous man who's convinced that he's fantastic simply because he got lucky (and engaged in criminal activities) and made a ton of money. He even refers to himself in the third person, as "The Wolf of Wall Street." (I know. I rolled my eyes too.) This book is mainly a blatant attempt to show off his wealth: what he spent on hotel rooms and drugs, what his wife spent on clothes and decorating, what his yacht cost... Getting a glimpse of the life of the "rich and dysfunctional," as Belfort calls it, is interesting for about twenty pages and then gets redundant and dull.

The main problem with the book is that Belford is so dislikable, it makes it impossible to care about anything that happens to him. (His yacht sinks? Who cares? He goes to jail? Good riddance.) But there's also an editing problem: the prologue of the book introduces us to a young Belfort, new to the finance world and in love with a girl he plans to marry. In the first chapter, Belfort is a rich jerk, who's cheating on wife number two (his former mistress) with about anything that moves. It would have been interesting to see the transformation of that naive boy into the arrogant jerk, but none of it is in the book. I guess otherwise there wouldn't have been enough room to point out that Belfort spent $60,000 on a crib for his daughter, and $700,000 on a hotel room.

His love for his children would be about the only redeeming quality Belfort has -- if only he hadn't acted like such a moron and even endangered his daughter while he was stoned out of his mind. His relationship with his wife, "the Duchess," whom he proclaims to love, is the most pathetic aspect of all, and not just because he constantly cheats on her, but also because he treats her somewhere between a sex object and a prostitute. The only thing he seems to be interested in doing with her is having sex and he's constantly promising things to her to secure her sexual favors. The only difference between him and a John who leaves cash on the night table is the form of payment.

If you're thinking of buying this book to have a glimpse into the lives of the rich and dysfunctional, you're better off getting a copy of any celebrity magazine, or renting Wall Street. Jordan Belfort is simply a Long Island Gordon Gekko wannabe, and a rather pathetic one at that.

PS: As of this writing, The Wolf of Wall Street has 16 five-star reviews. Fourteen of them are by people who never before, and never after, reviewed anything on Amazon. Either they loved the book sooo much they felt compelled to write a review for the first and only time in their lives... or Jordan Belfort has been working hard writing fake positive reviews for his book. LOL. Unfortunately for him, his efforts were about as successful as his attempts to stay out of jail.