Black Edge
Everyone knows the world of finance is ridden with chicanery and artifice, talismen and tricksters.
We got a closer look at the machinery of millionaires with The Big Short. And to a lesser degree, but with a greater entertainment quotient, The Wolf of Wall Street.
I’m here to tell you to pick up your reading glasses and check out a new book-cum-character assassination set in the murkiest corners of money — hedge funds — and against a backdrop of intentional mismanagement and deceit and a very clean kill it makes.
Black Edge is sensational. 100% real, it’s destined to follow in the pawprints of Wolf, and the surely-this-can’t-have-happened-but-it-didness of Short.
Insider trading is big business. Billions of dollars, big. And the underfunded but over-egoed SEC — the people who go about setting the record straight while Wall Street powerplayers simultaneously offers an often duplicitous version — is given the thankless task of not only fighting against the crooks trading on insider information, but also those seeking redress in the criminal courts.
The SEC has its sights set on the kingpin of hedge funds, one Steven Cohen of SAC Capital. The man has shown an otherworldly ability to predict the rise and fall of the markets to the point where his investors are seeing year on year growth in their fortunes beyond 20%. He’s a hot ticket. And a hot prospect for the SEC.
Their mission is to find the evidence to bring him to justice. And so begins a cat and mouse game with those associates responsible for making SCA the uninterrupted success it has become.
The book is here for reading. It’s gripping, and told with the flair of a Bloomberg reporter. Which is uncanny, because it’s told by a former Bloomberg reporter. What are the chances?
Black Edge veers between pacy and comedy with unhesitating ease. One of the highlights is Cohen committing to buy a Picasso for about $140m from the casino magnate Steve Wynn. During the last night of its residence on Wynn’s wall, the man of roulette riches hamfistedly puts a limb through the canvas. It’s the stuff of Kenneth Williams but in reality, a bill of $90,000 and several years’ waiting to put right.
Author Sheelah Kolhatkar needs to be very proud with all the research, smart and stylish interviewing, and the ultimate product.
Black Edge is a stunning read and would make anyone — even the most hardened, ardent investor — think twice about broaching the dirty world of hedge funds.
