This book was a great insight in to the world of telecom analysts who worked on Wall Street during the late 90s to early millenium years. The years of the dot com boom and bust. I was active in IT during those years and remember well when it came out that Worldcom had falsified it's earnings. Reading about it from an inside angle gave me a deeper appreciation of what was going on then and I am grateful for it.

Dan Reingold writes a compelling account of those times and if you are interested in learning a little of how Wall Street was during that time I highly recommmend reading it.

As for a learning experience, I took away some information for myself, little tid bits that author learned along the way that will no doubt benefit me in the future. His end statement in the book says it all. I cannot rate this 5 stars because the read, while interesting, did not hold me and it took a longer then usual period of time to finish the book. Still, I feel it was worth the read and recommend it.

The "What Elliot Spitzer Never Told You" heading on the cover is a bit misleading. Sure, Reingold's Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst reveals the corrupt Wall Street of that era, but I'd hardly consider it a 'tell-all' book, which is exactly what makes it good.
The main problem I have with this book is that Dan Reingold writes Confessions with a few biases and a few principles upon which he builds his perceptions of events. He portrays himself as 'holier than thou' while others as immoral. He fails to point out that the "corrupt" analysts and bankers were simply playing the game. With that in mind, he is in fact somewhat objective. He's on the sidelines of the unethical insider game being played on Wall Street. Because of that, he writes a memoir more detached from the events he tries to highlight. Confessions is devoid of biases on that level.
Another issue is the fact that Confessions is a little extensive for the content. Reingold, at times, focuses far too much on his day to day problems as an analyst and less on the corruption on Wall Street. Nonetheless, since it is so well written, I can live with the added length.
Confessions is very well written. Reingold incorporates statistics & prices that normally would slow a book like this down in a smooth fashion. Confessions reads well. More like a typical memoir than other Wall Street books.
Four stars: too long, too unobjective at points but a very well written and interesting memoir on Wall Street.

It ain't me, man, it ain't me. In "Confessions of a Wall St. Analyst" Daniel Reingold takes an estimable stab at hand washing in his expose of the telecomm investment mania of the late 1990s. Beginning his career as a sell side equity analyst in 1994, a pivotal moment for the heretofore sleepy telelcommunications industry, Reingold paints himself as a guileless, almost idealistic intellectual in the academic mode, transported by fate into the vicious and mendacious cauldron of greed known as Wall St.

Propelled by mounting ambition and, as he admits with sheepish reluctance during the book's progression, dazzled by the obscene riches flowing around the accounts of the bankers and analysts in his circle, Reingold tells a story of seduction. His rivalry with Jack Grubman, a fellow top telecomm analyst with a penchant for vulgarity that Reingold holds in contempt, provides a certain good vs. evil axis to the story as the decade progresses to its ultimate sorry conclusion. Report after report is issued extolling the virtues of AT+T, Quest, U.S. West, and most worryingly, WorldCom, as old economy stalwarts scramble to gobble up internet start ups and deals start tumbling over each other with a frantic pace that blots out any sense of rationality in this ostensibly dispassionate game.

The grand irony here is that for all of Reingold's fastidious number crunching and intellectual discipline, and all of Grubman's insider's power and swagger, neither of them added anything real to the far-fetched dialog going on. Emotion was the only force that drove the madness. As the stakes grew ever higher, companies simply stopped telling the truth in their financial statements, using accounting loopholes to cover up monstrous gaps in revenues and profits, and the analysts were none the wiser, or at least none the braver. All they did during this pathetic process was enable the culprits and enrich themselves. Dan Reingold was standing nose high in this muck, despite his protestations of shock.

So while he decries the system he came to abhor, he lets himself off the hook with relative ease. Here's a man with exceptional talents who saw an opportunity, and for that he can't be blamed. But the tone of the book is galling, when one considers that manias like the telecomm frenzy have been part of history since man began trading, and that people like Dan Reingold are paid handsomely to protect the investment public. In this he failed, and should count himself lucky not to have met with criminal prosecution, but only with generalized, and temporary, disgrace.

His writing is adequate, and does provide a window into the psychology of market mania. It might be hard for any mortal to resist the cookie jar passed under Reingold's nose. But in its naive tone the book exposes a major flaw. This isn't the first time this has happened, Mr. Reingold, and it won't be the last. You and your ilk are part of a time worn and pernicious tradition. We've seen all of you, and many others in decades and centuries past, stripped naked before us, and the sight is never pretty. Thanks for the book--let the public take it for exactly what it's worth.

I was not quite sure how to review this and remain objective. I have always been a big fan of Wall Street lore, and the recent bubble has given me tons of material from its many participants.

This novel was no different, it told the story of a man who was, among many others, in the middle of all the pandemonium of a boom and bust. I like this kind of stuff though, so for myself, I would rate this book a 4.5 star.

The author goes very far to get all of his numerical facts right, and I enjoyed knowing the ins and outs of every deal. But I could see how someone, just wanting to read a biography of someone on Wall Street, may get a big bogged down in all the numbers and intricate situations. Even I towards the end was starting to wonder how many more pages I would have to read through. The author doesn't put much of a "seat of your chair" spin on any of the trials either(even though we all know what happens), which may be another down point for someone looking to find excitement in these Confessions.

All in all I would say a good book, I enjoyed it and learned quite a bit more about the life of an analyst. I also thought that his section at the end of the book, going over the changes made and their effectiveness was very well done. A great read if you are interested in this kind of stuff.

I found this book to be more of a dairy than confessional. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed it but the theme was set early on, "My colleagues aren't playing fair and I'm still going to take the money."

Because the author is documenting real events, it was refreshing to get an insiders perspective on WorldCom's lifecycle. In particular, as a CNBC viewer, the talking heads are always tossing around ... "former head of Citigroup ..." and several of these players show up in the book. So that was a value added aspect that I enjoyed.

The thing I found funny was that the last page of the book pretty much sums it up. I did pick up a few trading notes but things were drawn out in the later half of the book. Enjoy.

..but each time I felt that I liked the author, he kept bringing up instances to support his extreme dislike of Grubman. This really took away from the content and message of the book. I think it would have been enough to state how different he was from Grubman and then let his own example of hard, clean work be benchmark for the reader to compare the 2 analysts. In the end, no one can say Grubman was as honest a man as Reingold.