The Best Wall Street Book of 2024 Is Also the Least Salacious
Carrie Sun’s Private Equity, Alok Sama’s The Money Trap and Gary Stevenson’s The Trading Game reveal what makes a good book about finance — and what doesn’t.
Illustration: Kimberly Elliot for Bloomberg
It’s December on Wall Street, and the annual traditions have already begun among finance professionals: speculation about their year-end bonuses; resolutions that after this year’s bonus, they will live their most interesting lives; and further resolutions that their most interesting lives will include writing about all the crazy things they’ve seen on the Street. Come January, for almost everyone, four other traditions will set in: not quitting, not writing that book, not being satisfied with the bonus, and not speaking aloud any of this to mortals for whom the dissatisfying number would be the stuff of dreams.
And yet some people will quit. Some people will write a memoir, tipping their hat to Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker as they leave. And some, but only some, of those memoirs will shed light on Wall Street in ways following the news cannot.