The Best of Braverman FAQ

Mod note: Blast from the Past - "Best of Eddie". This one is originally from July 2013. If you haven't already checked out Eddie's book, be sure to give it a look!

I really appreciate all the support yesterday with the Sample Chapter. You guys are gonna love the book. I thought I'd answer the most frequently asked question I get about it in this post:

Q) When does the book come out?
A) The book is available now at: https://bravermedia.leadpages.net/bestofbraverman-wso1/

Q) How much is it?
A) $9.95

Q) Is it available in Kindle format?
A) Absolutely. I got my first Kindle in early 2008, and I'm rocking a Kindle Fire HD 32gb these days. I absolutely love Kindle, so creating a great Kindle experience with my book was a top priority. The book is an enhanced ebook in a Kindle-optimized PDF format, making it truly cross-platform and enjoyable on any reading device, including computer screens and mobile phones. It is perhaps the most interactive book you've read to date; if you find that you have a question or a comment on something, you can email me, tweet me, or PM me on WSO without even leaving the book. I spent a lot of money to get this right, so enjoy. If you want the PDF converted to Kindle, just email it to Amazon and they'll shoot it back to you in Kindle format in less than five minutes.

Q) So can I buy it on Amazon?
A) Not yet. It will be available on Amazon eventually. I absolutely love Amazon and I have to believe I'm one of their biggest customers. But as a startup guy, I have to put my money where my mouth is and support the startup ecosystem I'm so passionate about. Gumroad has the absolute best delivery system and user experience in the market, so that's where the book will launch. One of the coolest things about this delivery system is that the book is personalized to you, with your name on the cover. I can't be there to do book signings, so this is the next best thing.

Q) Will there be a dead-tree version of the book?
A) Yes, depending upon demand. It will likely go hand-in-hand with the launch on Amazon.

Q) Are you doing anything special for WSO readers?
A) Of course! When you buy The Best of Braverman, you're going to get my next book for free! As most of you know, I'm a big productivity nerd and one of the best productivity tools out there is Gmail. Thing is, the vast majority of the people who use Gmail have no idea what's possible with it. What started out as a WSO blog post has morphed into a sort of Gmail manifesto full of clever hacks and extensions to make Gmail unbelievably useful to you. I'm probably going to sell it for $4.95 when it comes out, but those of you who buy The Best of Braverman will get it for free. While we're on the subject, I have to tell you how surprised I was at how ubiquitous Gmail is for WSO users. I knew there would be a lot, but it's over 90% of the people who signed up for the pre-launch.

Q) What the hell took you so long?
A) A lot of this stuff was pretty hard to write about. It's a great read and it'll entertain the hell out of you, but some of the things I had to admit about myself and the decisions I made were pretty painful, and it took a lot to commit to write about them. Spending a year of your life on the run because your firm is after you for millions of dollars sounds cool, but it was not one of the higher points in my life. Coming to grips with functional alcoholism, PTSD, and the consequences those things inevitably lead to can be...well...really hard and uncomfortable to admit. I don't want you to get the idea that the book is heavy or delves deeply into my twisted psyche, because it doesn't, but I don't hold anything back either.

Q) When is the movie coming out?
A) God help us all.

Q) Record number of calls in a day?
A) Over 500.

Q) Did the Blimp story make the cut?
A) LOL. Sadly, no. Which is a shame because it's one of my personal favorites. But the Monkey story did make the cut. I had to draw the line somewhere; I couldn't let the book run to a thosand pages!

Q) What are the rest of the chapters about?
A) In addition to my best posts from WSO (which are updated and professionally edited in the book), I go into how I got into the business, what it was like back then, how I caniballized my entire training class for fun and profit, the dumbest thing I ever did in my career and how it cost me a year of my life on the run, a bit of stuff about my time as a futures trader, and I published the full Plan I wrote up back in early-2010 which led to the Playboy cover story. I'll be interested to get your feedback on the Plan and if you think it would have really worked, because it's never been published before.

Q) Will the book be available outside the US?
A) Absolutely. Worldwide on Day One. And Gumroad accepts payment in over 100 currencies.

Q) So what's the deal with the dogs?
A) Okay, so 10-percent of the proceeds from the sale of the book are going to Hope For Paws. It's no secret that I'm a dog lover; I have been my whole life. But in July of 2005, something truly horrific happened to my wife and I. It was the kind of thing that scars your soul, and you never really recover from. A month later Hurricane Katrina destroyed my home town. Between these two events, I was on my heels like never before in my life.

Then one day I get a call from a friend of my wife's. People are only now starting to move back to the city as parts of it finally emerge from the flooding. She tells me that there's a big dog living in her mom's back yard and it looks hurt. Her mom is afraid to go near it, and would I come get the dog and take it to the pound? You have to remember that, at this point, you still couldn't get police or firefighters to show up, so you certainly weren't going to find animal control. I told her I'd take care of it.

When I got to the house and found the dog in the back yard, I didn't think he was long for this world. He'd been living on his own in the flooded city for a month. He was starved and dehydrated, and he'd been shot in the leg. He didn't want me anywhere near him but, when he figured out I wasn't going away, he eventually gave up and let me carry him out of there. I named him Hudson and we've been together every day since, and it's not hyperbole when I say that saving his life saved my own in no small way. Having him by my side made it easier to cope with my own damage, the damage to our lives, and the damage to our city.

Anyway, I didn't mean to get all weepy on you. Hope For Paws is all about rescuing dogs in Hudson's situation, and I want to cut them a big, fat check so they can keep doing what they're doing. So when you buy my book, not only will you be getting a great Wall Street story and an awesome productivity tool for ten bucks, you'll be helping out guys like this:

I can't wait to get the book in y'all's hands. Let me know if you have any other questions!

Click here to get your personalized copy of the book!

 

Congrats man

You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake, son.
 

Glad it's finally out and congrats! Speaking of a movie, maybe McQueen would have been a solid choice to play your character if he was still around.

" A recession is when other people lose their job, a depression is when you lose your job. "
 

Just snapped up the PDF. Looking forward to reading it. Taking a quick spin through the table of contents it looks like most of my favorite posts of yours made the cut and it will be nice to have them all in one place. Only ones I don't see on here that I really like are the Man Week ones.

Glad to see your first WSO-related book finally come out. Congratulations!

 

i don't have much to contribute here other than this: i think this book is going to do really well. in fact, i think it could do really, REALLY well if word gets around. Not because of the facts of his stories (although they are rather incredible on their own), but because he is an AWESOME writer, which goes back to what he was saying earlier - he's brutally honest. This makes for hilarity as well.

 
Edmundo Braverman:

I really appreciate all the support yesterday with the Sample Chapter. You guys are gonna love the book. I thought I'd answer the most frequently asked question I get about it in this post:

I'm buying this bad boy ASAP. Can't wait to read it, been hearing about it for years :D

"You stop being an asshole when it sucks to be you." -IlliniProgrammer "Your grammar made me wish I'd been aborted." -happypantsmcgee
 

Just finished reading the book. Overall I think it was a great read and well worth the money. I would highly recommend this book to anybody that is looking for a interesting, fun read even if they aren't interested in finance. The book covers a broad range of topics and Eddie drops great insight into every chapter.

Things I liked about the book...

The first thing that stands out about the book is the general content of the chapters. Eddie does a great job of covering his career in trading, he goes into great detail about the environment back in the day and paints an amazing picture of what it was like for him to be starting out in the 90's and how he went from a painstakingly awkward rejection from Merrill Lynch to the top of his training class in a matter of months.

I was pleased that not only did the book tell a good story but Eddie doesn't hesitate to give advice concerning everything from kids to marriage to quitting your job for greener pastures. He really makes you think twice about where your career is heading, and whether or not its going to make you happy. He holds nothing back and gives you the quick, dirty analysis your used to seeing in his posts.

Along with some of his bests posts from WSO, the unpublished content goes into great detail about the personal details of Eddie's life. From personally fucking over every member of his previous firm to his subsequent time in Mexico on the run, he doesn't leave any chapter of his life untouched.

The writing style was perhaps my favorite part of the book. The way Eddie writes makes it easy to live vicariously into a time where wall street was a lot crazier than it is now.

Things I didn't like...

Overall I think it lacked a little bit of flow, it seems to jump around from point to point a little bit and I think it could be organized a little better. Like I said, the content was great but I don't think the way it was organized took full advantage of that.

There were also a couple spelling errors and grammatically it wasn't perfect. But it was pretty easy to overlook and I understand the writing style had a lot to do with it.

 
Best Response

Wow! Thanks for the great review!

As for the things you weren't crazy about: layout was the book's achilles heel from Day One. It might be hard to imagine, but the first iteration was a disaster from a layout point of view and this final layout is a HUGE improvement.

It was always going to be difficult when you're taking often unrelated but still very valuable posts and converting them to chapters in a book. One of my volunteer monkey editors suggested that I organize the whole thing in a more or less chronological order, and that made the most sense so that's what I did. My editor at Kirkus further suggested breaking the book into subsections, but I didn't think that would be an improvement. Maybe I was wrong.

As for typos, they're the bane of any writer. When I got the manuscript back from the editor, it was easily 1000% better, but he still may have missed a few. If you feel like getting them to me I'll fix them. As for grammar, I didn't always agree with the grammatical changes my professional editor made, but at the end of the day I was paying him a lot of money so it made sense to stick with the edits he provided. I don't always speak or write in the Queen's English, but he felt it was important that the book be completely grammatically correct down to the last imperial comma.

 

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