As of this writing, 24 reviews have been posted, 23 of them being 5-star. The overwhelming number of 5-star reviews are what sold me the book. And now I feel very cheated. I can only surmise that most of these reviews are from Mr. Goldberg's college students.

Do yourself a very big favor and pass this one up - that is, unless you're looking for a VERY simplistic and poorly presented analysis of goings on in the financial system.

The book's organizing principle is what Mr. Goldberg calls the competition between Wall Street "buyers" and Wall Street "sellers". Prior to purchase, I thought that Mr. Goldberg, armed with this apparently creative distinction, would provide a penetrating and illuminating analysis - especially since he is a former financial insider, and especially since so many reviewers here have given this work 5 stars.

Wow, I couldn't have been more wrong...

From the Introduction:
"The battle is primarily between two giant armies - the buyers, whose soldiers come from such places as hedge funds; and the sellers, whose armed forces come from such places as hybrid commercial/investment banks."

With this organizing principle now established (really ?????), Mr. Goldberg commences from page one to simply start firing away, pouring forth information about financial matters without ever offering a clear definition as to what, exactly, constitutes "buy side" versus "sell side" activity.

To make matters worse, the manner of presentation is cursory and difficult to follow. Literally speaking, one paragraph will describe some aspect of the buy side; then the next paragraph will say something about the sell side; then back to the buy side; then back to the sell side; etc. Meanwhile, Mr. Goldberg relies exclusively on the highly amorphous terms "sell side" and "buy side" over and over the entire way. And all of this takes place absent use of any other major organizing principle. The reader is thus tasked with the unwelcome burden of reaching through this conceptual mess into the text to pull out the so called useful information: incessantly simplistic descriptions and analysis of important financial events and phenomena.

1 star: The information contained indeed has value, but is astonishingly unsophisticated and horribly presented and could easily be found elsewhere. The book's central selling point - the big to-do of "sell side" versus "buy side" - is essentially worthless imho: as presented by Mr. Goldberg, it is a greatly superficial and utterly imprecise distinction, offering the reader no meaningful insight.

Ugh. This book is painful. The universe just ate my $20.


Edit: Upon closer inspection, I see that 12 of the 5-star reviews originate from Massachusetts, and 5 more originate from New York and Connecticut. And almost without exception, all authors have written a grand total of 1 Amazon book review each. I would hardly be surprised to learn that several other reviewers now temporarily reside in Massachusetts, and within a small radius of the college where Mr. Goldberg teaches.

In other words, this book is a total piece of cheese, to put it kindly, and it appears that a great many (ahem...nearly all) of the 23 5-star reviews published thus far are of questionable accuracy regarding the book's true worth: Buyer beware indeed.

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