Favorite Finance Books and Least Favorite Finance Cliches (Part 1)

Like many of you likely reading this, I’m a huge fan of Liar’s Poker and Monkey Business and The Buy Side and Young Money...yes, I’m a finance story junkie. Basically, I read anything that I can get my hands on in this sub-genre of sub-genres and I know there are plenty of others like myself. That said, even a super fan like me gets worn out by the clichés which are repeated in over and over again. In fact so much so that I even published my own book in the genre called The Pitchbook. When drafting the first manuscript, I tried my hardest to avoid these repetitive themes or purposefully made a twist on them. Here are some of main ones:

1. Drugs – As someone who has worked in investment banking and equity research, I’ve never seen anyone do drugs. Sorry to disappoint. Maybe, I’m a dork or nerd and don’t get the invites to the right parties or something, but I just haven’t seen it. Most managing directors and company CEOs are not trying to stay out until 3 a.m. blowing an 8-ball of coke – they want to see their kid’s little league game as soon as they’re done with your dumb client meeting or road show. In fact, want to never work in the industry again? Bring out a bag of drugs at your next client interaction. Perhaps, in some shady corners of the industry, this still exists, but it is certainly not mainstream. If anything, drugs are in tech these days with rampant glorification of microdosing and hallucinogenics to wild trips to Burning Man. Yet, read any literary finance work or watch almost any finance movie and the characters are doing drugs in 90% of the time.

2. The Industry’s Dirty Laundry – Almost every book in the genre is essentially about how bad the industry is and how terrible the characters within it are. Yes, there are plenty of greedy and terrible people in the business, but as just mentioned, there are plenty of normal people too who are just trying make a buck and send their kids to college. Nonetheless, in the world of finance writers, every author overemphasizes the worst of it. And, I get it. Publishers want the juicy details. Most editors and publishers are not friendlies when it comes to the world of finance. They want to make it look as bad as possible. Sadly, I think many well-known finance authors do a disservice to readers truly interested in the subject matter who want the real take. Furthermore, if you embellish how bad certain people behave for your own literary aspirations, doesn’t that in some way make you a bad person as well? That’s some food for thought for my fellow writers.

3. Sweeping Generalizations about the World Economy – Ok, so you were a two-year fixed income sales analyst or a second year M&A analyst and wrote a book about your experiences. Great – these book are often very entertaining reads and I’ve enjoyed almost all of them. However, guess what? Two years in a low-ranking position on Wall Street does not give you some special crystal ball into the macroeconomics of the global economy. For some reason, these stories always start as personal experiences on Wall Street…..but just wait for it. Almost without fail, a few chapters before the end, you will get an extensive tirade laying out everything wrong with the world economy and how the author sees it so clearly from his perch as a second year banking analyst. In addition, there will also be an obligatory connection between a greedy trader/banker/colleague from their story and how the global economy is falling apart. Is it too much to tell the reader about your life story without the preaching and perhaps an ounce of humility along with that?

As you can tell, I’m kind of fired up about this subject. If people enjoy part one, I’ll put a few more in the coming weeks. And lastly as I noted, I love this genre and all the books named above. Read them and you will enjoy them. That said, as writers, there are some things that we can do better from this point on for the genre.