Customer Reviews

Working the Street: What You Need to Know About Life on Wall Street

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One of the great strengths of this book is that it gives straight, pithy, unvarnished advice about how to succeed at an Investment Bank. The author, a retired a Managing director at Merrill Lynch, focuses mainly on the corporate politics rather than the detailed content of the jobs themselves.

The author touches on many areas, from how to get a job, how to navigate the corporate politics, and knowing when to leave. To begin, he reviews the process of picking a job that fits your personality in sales, trading, research, or control/staff jobs. He discusses how to survive the 3-5 years a new analyst/associate while doing the "grunt" work of preparing presentations, prospectuses, or trade tickets. He discusses the demands (12 hr+ days), the toll on your personal life, and the high pay that compensates you for the risk of layoffs. He also reviews the politics within the firm, and the natural tensions between producers & corporate staffers, investment bankers & research analysts, flow traders and "intellectual" traders, and between all departments at bonus time. Helpful work tips are also emphasized, such as multitasking, punctuality, working foreign assignments, and how to build support within the firm to maximize your compensation at bonus time. Through it all, despite the downsides that the author freely acknowledges, he believes that on balance jobs on Wall Street are worth it, because they have it all - intellectual stimulation, excitement, and great compensation.

On the downside, I found the book's title a bit misleading - the focus of the book is on Investment banks, not on Wall Street as a whole. Granted, that covers a lot of `The Street,' but not all ( what about investment management? Credit rating agencies? Commercial banks? Hedge funds? Venture capital? These aren't covered.) I think that if you want a broader view of the financial services industry, or details about specific firms, then there are other guides out there are better for that - such as the "WetFeet Insider Guides," "The Vault" Guides, as well as "The Fast Track" by Naficy. But this book covers the corporate politics better than any of the guides I just mentioned. So if you're buying a few books to read up on how to succeed at Wall Street jobs, put this one on your list.

It draws a good picture of the pros and cons of working on Wall Street, and it brings a few useful hints on building your career. I wish it had a chapter specific for quants.

The author does a great job of giving you the lay of the land of the heart of the financial world. It is easy to read and understand and presents a very practical and useful picture of a Wall Street career.

To tell you the truth, I didn' t suppose the book could be so awesome. It looks very good, even if it's used, seems new.

I read most of the book, and think it's a kind of introduction and overview of life in investment bank or cooperations in wallstreet~

Maybe it's useful to students who dream to work there! :)