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    Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
    Unavailable
    Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
    Unavailable
    Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
    Audiobook12 hours

    Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street

    Written by Sheelah Kolhatkar

    Narrated by Kaleo Griffith

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The story of the billionaire trader Steven A. Cohen, the rise and fall of his hedge fund, SAC Capital, and the largest insider trading investigation in history-for readers of The Big Short, Den of Thieves, and Dark Money.

    The rise over the last two decades of a powerful new class of billionaire financiers marks a singular shift in the American economic and political landscape. Their vast reserves of concentrated wealth have allowed a small group of big winners to write their own rules of capitalism and public policy. How did we get here? Through meticulous reporting and powerful storytelling, New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar shows how Steve Cohen became one of the richest and most influential figures in finance-and what happened when the Justice Department put him in its crosshairs.

    Cohen and his fellow pioneers of the hedge fund industry didn't lay railroads, build factories, or invent new technologies. Rather, they made their billions through speculation, by placing bets in the market that turned out to be right more often than wrong-and for this they have gained not only extreme personal wealth but formidable influence throughout society. Hedge funds now manage nearly $3 trillion in assets, and competition between them is so fierce that traders will do whatever they can to get an edge.

    Cohen was one of the industry's greatest success stories. He mastered poker in high school, went off to Wharton, and in 1992 launched SAC Capital, which he built into a $15 billion empire, almost entirely on the basis of his wizardlike stock trading. He cultivated an air of mystery, reclusiveness, and extreme excess, building a 35,000 square foot mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, and amassing one of the largest private art collections in the world. On Wall Street, Cohen was revered as a genius.

    That image was shattered when SAC became the target of a sprawling, seven-year government investigation. Labeled by prosecutors as a "magnet for market cheaters" whose culture encouraged the relentless hunt for "edge"-and even "black edge," or inside information-SAC was ultimately indicted in connection with a vast insider trading scheme, even as Cohen himself was never charged.

    Black Edge offers a revelatory look at the gray zone in which so much of Wall Street functions, and a window into the transformation of the U.S. economy. It's a riveting, true-life legal thriller that takes readers inside the government's pursuit of Cohen and his employees, and raises urgent questions about the power and wealth of those who sit at the pinnacle of modern Wall Street.

    Praise for Black Edge

    "A modern version of Moby-Dick, with wiretaps rather than harpoons."-Jennifer Senior, The New York Times 

    "Excellent."-The Economist 

    "If you liked James B. Stewart's Den of Thieves, Sheelah Kolhatkar's thrilling Black Edge should be next on your reading list."-The Wall Street Journal

    "A lot of people do not trust Wall Street. They regard it as a moneymaking machine for those who work there, which has little interest in practice in its stated aim of channeling capital into businesses and helping them to grow for the broader benefit of society. For such skeptics, Steven Cohen is Exhibit A."-John Gapper, Financial Times

    "A richly reported, entertaining tale about the cat-and-mouse game between the government and Cohen."-Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times Book Review 

    Editor's Note

    The inside scoop…

    As the stock market continues to soar in 2017, get the inside scoop on the greed and collusion on Wall Street that contributed to the 2008 recession. This chilling real-life thriller about hedge fund manager Steven Cohen’s insider trading and attempts to elude government officials investigating him is this generation’s “The Big Short.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 28, 2017
    ISBN9780525525035
    Unavailable
    Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street

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    Reviews for Black Edge

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    • 4/5
      Sometimes the villain wins and the good guys don't get their man. Basically that's what this book is all about. Steve Cohen is the CEO of SAC Capital, a very thriving hedge fund in the 1980s. To be successful and profitable, it helps that they fund has a "black edge." This involves access to information not known to the general investor or to other investment firms or banks. Knowing what the quarterly results are of a company or finding out how well a company's proposed new product is progressing prior to the information being released is a huge strategic advantage – – but it's also illegal.

      How Steve Cohen protected himself from indictment and prosecution given that all the pawns around him were ensnared by regulators and the FBI is the crux of this book. This book reads like a novel – – a great deal of information about the personalities, motivations and histories of the various characters within the story. The lifestyles of the various characters in the book, particularly Steve Cohen's is very interesting reading. Cohen's relationships with his ex and current wife was fascinating also...

      There are a number of surprise endings on how things for various characters as this book concluded. This was not your typical stodgy business book. I really enjoyed the story and the lessons to be learned from this period. An excellent read.
    • 4/5
      Yes, this is a book about greed and the naked pursuit of riches at all cost. Steven Cohen is one of the world’s wealthiest men, founder of the now-defunct SAC Capital Advisors, and while he is no doubt a talented trader, the phrase “ill-gotten gains” could not be more aptly applied. Cohen ran a hedge fund for many years that aggressively sought and profited from insider information, extracting billions illegally from the market. Kolhatkar’s account of Cohen’s career portrays his working class background, precocious early successes, and rise to dominant position in the industry. Along the way, we are treated to the illicit delivery of information by corporate confederates, and the depraved extraction of dollars through the manipulation of trusting relationships.But this vivid telling is as much about about the pursuit of Cohen and his empire by the FBI, the SEC, and the US Department of Justice. The story mutates into that of hardworking and devoted attorneys and investigators whose years of persistence and passion in trying to bring Cohen to justice and to right the shameless wrongdoings on Wall Street comes to little in the end. Justice does not prevail. Cohen pays 2 billion dollars in fines to settle up his differences with the US government. Apparently this is a trifling inconvenience in a career undeterred and unrepentant. In a short time he is seen writing nine-figure checks for Giacometti sculptures, and the following year his profit exceeds the $2 billion fine.The pace and interest increase steadily and deliberately during the second half of the book. Kolhatkar is a skilled journalist and former financial analyst, and she takes on a complex web of financial dealings and delivers it all as riveting thriller. Depressing though the denouement may be, a clear view into Wall Street criminality can be had in a form that manages to feel embarrassingly like entertainment.
    • 5/5
      Such a well written book that turns the dry subjects of trading and finance into a captivating crime novel.
    • 5/5
      Her reporting and storytelling—outstanding! Learned a lot about financial industry and law intersection
    • 5/5
      Deep, detailed and exciting reporting! A must read for anyone interested on the inner workings of Wall Street
    • 5/5
      I knew about insider trader, but this was eye opening. It really has changed my view on several things...and that is rare for me.
    • 3/5
      This is the real-world stuff that the Billions TV series is based on
    • 3/5
      Black Edge documents the investigation and prosecution of the insider trading and one of the most powerful hedge funds, SAC Capital run by Steve Cohen. Hedge funds in general have the aura of dishonest conductive by nature of their very foundation and secrecy. Yet they are and probably will be successful in their quest of wealth.In this particular fund Cohen was able to build up a team of traders who he allegedly encouraged to funnel insider information to take that advantage edge, albeit illegal. Yet try as the might the SEC and other prosecutors never were able to tag the big fish, Cohen, and despite breaking up the fund he goes on his merry way with his billions.And so the despite some of the smaller fish being busted and sentenced for the illegal conduct the big fry gets away and moves on down the road. Many of those enforcement folks then move on to lucrative law firms eventually hired by the billionaire scofflaws and the beat goes on. The American financial system as it is.
    • 4/5
      Extremely readable, and timely. The focus stays narrow, so we don't get much context. Unfortunately, nor do we get too much insight into Steven Cohen, and only limited insight into his employee Mathew Martoma (who takes the fall rather than cooperating with prosecutors against Cohen). What we do learn is certainly interesting. The story is also rather depressing. Basically Cohen steals billions of dollars and not only gets away with it, but the government regulators end up working for him. His lawyer goes to work in the Trump administration. > an advance team of consultants made the journey ahead of him. He rented an extra room wherever he was staying and used it as a staging area where his staff re-created his trading station> Expectations for bapi had become massively inflated. The results wouldn't be released to the public for another nine days, but Martoma could see clearly how this would be interpreted by the market: Elan and Wyeth shares would crash once this news got out. … Over the next nine days, Cohen's trader sold 10.5 million shares of Elan. Another trader did the same thing with SAC's Wyeth position. No one in the market could see that SAC was selling. Even after liquidating his position, Cohen wasn't finished. Once the selling was done, Cohen shorted 4.5 million shares of Elan, worth $960 million.> SAC was organized to insulate Cohen from the behavior of the lower-level traders and analysts. All of the ideas for trades were filtered through layers of portfolio managers and assigned codes for how strong they were before they reached him—a "high conviction" idea might be given to the boss without explaining why the analyst was so sure about it> The use of these expert networks was widespread in the hedge fund industry—once a few funds started using them, everyone else had to do so as well to try to keep up with their competitors. It had become obvious to investigators that many of the expert networks provided a cover for the exchange of inside information,> In the past, the criminal prosecutors and the SEC had tried to coordinate the timing of their filings to avoid interfering with one another. It was essential that they maintain a unified front. Not only was the SEC violating that implicit agreement to work together, they were racing ahead with a weak case—failure to supervise instead of insider trading.> Lorin Reisner, the head of Bharara’s criminal division who helped negotiate SAC's $1.8 billion fine, became a partner at Paul, Weiss, the same law firm that supplied Cohen's legal defense team. Antonia Apps, the prosecutor who tried the Steinberg case, left the government for a partnership at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, another corporate law firm where she does white collar defense work. Bharara's deputy, Richard Zabel, announced that he was taking a job as general counsel at a hedge fund called Elliott Management, which is run by the prominent billionaire political donor Paul Singer. After twenty-five years with the FBI, B. J. Kang's former supervisor, Patrick Carroll, joined Goldman Sachs as a vice president in its compliance group. … Amelia Cottrell, a senior enforcement attorney at the SEC who oversaw the agency's Martoma investigation. At the end of June 2015, she shocked her colleagues by announcing that she was joining Willkie Farr, the firm where Cohen's longtime defense counsel Marty Klotz worked> The general counsel for Point72, Cohen's private investment firm, was appointed, briefly, by the incoming Trump administration to recruit candidates for the new Justice Department
    • 5/5
      Welcome to the universe of the greediest hedge fund bastard on Wall St, Steve Cohen of SAC. The reporter does a fine job of detailing the investigation that attempted (and failed) to bring him down permanently. It's a read designed to infuriate, because most of the players, even the not-so-long arms of the law, are so competitive that their own urges to defeat their internal rivals become the highest priority. Cohen is naturally a great trader, but that's not enough for the greedhead, who decides that his staff needs to feed him inside info illegally and to break the law to keep his coffers overflowing. He is so repulsively money hungry that the reader wishes he'd choke on his billions and save us a few bucks. The cherry on the sundae is that he's an art collector whose competitiveness, even in that endeavor, means keeping fine art works away from the public with his ill gotten gains. And after getting a little slap on the financial wrist, he STILL gets to start another hedge fund in 2018! Happy days!

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