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nghia 's review for:
This is the story of a years-long investigation by the SEC & FBI into insider trading by the hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen. On the whole it is well-reported & researched and offers intriguing insights into the relatively secretive world of hedge funds. It ends up making a fairly convincing case that insider trading -- and probably other forms of "cheating" -- are fairly rife in the industry and that government regulators are almost entirely outclassed, lacking the resources & political support to do much about it.
When I was about 60% of the way through the book I would have given this 4-stars. I found the sections on Mathew Martoma and his "seduction" of Dr. Sid Gilman the most interesting & poignant. Martoma spent months ingratiating himself with Gilman, becoming a friend, spending hours talking on the phone. The day after the results of the clinical trial came out, he never spoke to Gilman again.
Kolhatkar also makes it clear that Cohen is far from a nice person. The most striking example is when, after his divorce, he cuts the salary of his employees and explicitly tells them it is because he lost a lot of money in the divorce and is cutting their salary to increase his own.
That said, towards the last third of the book -- and especially in the concluding few chapters -- I revised my downward slightly. It still remains an interesting story but there are some jumps and cuts that kind of lost me. The FBI agent kinda disappears from the narrative, the dissolution of the hedge fund SAC felt like it came from nowhere. Some of that is down to the messy nature of reality. This isn't a story with a nice narrative arc and a tidy ending. The "bad guy" -- Steve Cohen -- gets away with everything in the end. He's still worth over $10 billion. As of 2019, he's running a hedge fund with 1400 employees. He doesn't give any interviews over the course of the investigation.
It is a bit disappointing but I can't fault the author too much for that reality. She has to write based on the evidence she has and the interviews she can get. So while there is a lot of innuendo about insider trading in hedge funds, there is unfortunately little juicy hard dirt. She says that nearly everyone she spoke to says that everyone does it. And I believe that. But over the course of this book we only see two or three actual cases of it.
The main reason I downgraded the book to three-stars was that I realised Kolhatkar was so wrapped up in the story, the sequence of events, the "this happened and then that happened", that I felt she missed out on the opportunity to really grapple with what is and isn't insider trading. Through the entire course of the book she simply assumes, without any actual explanation, that what everyone is doing is insider trading. And you, the reader, may agree with that. So it comes as a shock that in a concluding chapter, she mentions that an appeals court disagreed. For one of the main instances of insider trading she traces in the book, the court found that nothing that happened was actually insider trading. The government dropped all charges. Had to pay penalties and restitution of millions. That "oh, it wasn't a crime after all" felt like a shocking conclusion to that part of the story. Kolhatkar, briefly, argues that the court was wrong. But it felt half-hearted and late.
Between that and the somewhat confusing narrative at parts towards the end, I ended up revising it down a 3-star rating. I still generally liked it -- three stars doesn't mean a bad book. I just felt like there was a bit of a missed opportunity.
When I was about 60% of the way through the book I would have given this 4-stars. I found the sections on Mathew Martoma and his "seduction" of Dr. Sid Gilman the most interesting & poignant. Martoma spent months ingratiating himself with Gilman, becoming a friend, spending hours talking on the phone. The day after the results of the clinical trial came out, he never spoke to Gilman again.
Kolhatkar also makes it clear that Cohen is far from a nice person. The most striking example is when, after his divorce, he cuts the salary of his employees and explicitly tells them it is because he lost a lot of money in the divorce and is cutting their salary to increase his own.
That said, towards the last third of the book -- and especially in the concluding few chapters -- I revised my downward slightly. It still remains an interesting story but there are some jumps and cuts that kind of lost me. The FBI agent kinda disappears from the narrative, the dissolution of the hedge fund SAC felt like it came from nowhere. Some of that is down to the messy nature of reality. This isn't a story with a nice narrative arc and a tidy ending. The "bad guy" -- Steve Cohen -- gets away with everything in the end. He's still worth over $10 billion. As of 2019, he's running a hedge fund with 1400 employees. He doesn't give any interviews over the course of the investigation.
It is a bit disappointing but I can't fault the author too much for that reality. She has to write based on the evidence she has and the interviews she can get. So while there is a lot of innuendo about insider trading in hedge funds, there is unfortunately little juicy hard dirt. She says that nearly everyone she spoke to says that everyone does it. And I believe that. But over the course of this book we only see two or three actual cases of it.
The main reason I downgraded the book to three-stars was that I realised Kolhatkar was so wrapped up in the story, the sequence of events, the "this happened and then that happened", that I felt she missed out on the opportunity to really grapple with what is and isn't insider trading. Through the entire course of the book she simply assumes, without any actual explanation, that what everyone is doing is insider trading. And you, the reader, may agree with that. So it comes as a shock that in a concluding chapter, she mentions that an appeals court disagreed. For one of the main instances of insider trading she traces in the book, the court found that nothing that happened was actually insider trading. The government dropped all charges. Had to pay penalties and restitution of millions. That "oh, it wasn't a crime after all" felt like a shocking conclusion to that part of the story. Kolhatkar, briefly, argues that the court was wrong. But it felt half-hearted and late.
Between that and the somewhat confusing narrative at parts towards the end, I ended up revising it down a 3-star rating. I still generally liked it -- three stars doesn't mean a bad book. I just felt like there was a bit of a missed opportunity.