Considering I still don’t understand most of the financial stuff in this book, this is the most engaging intro to investment banking I’ve read (in my almost zilch experience reading about investment banking). I drew a little diagram to understand bonds while reading, and the fact I bothered to get out my pen to understand a complex foreign system written about in a book read for leisure purposes speaks to the attention-grabbing nature of the writing, even when it was also absolutely confusing. Also there were many laugh out loud moments in the first half of the book. People interested in finance will of course find this interesting, as well as those interested in how to make boring complicated things interesting. But surprisingly due to the book tracing the author’s 20s, I find this book is a fun story for navigating work as new grads (in wholly disrespectful immoral self-serving ways) - particularly the dynamics people might encounter and how to deal with them.

When a single game of Liar's Poker is played with a million dollars at stake at a workplace, just what, or whom, in the world are you dealing with? The most money-hungry industry, probably. Wall Street, ding, ding!

Money is a nebulous thing, and when you start dealing in the millions, perhaps billions, over a telephone, what happens to you and your soul? When Savings & Loans managers sell out for a chance to play in the big leagues, the world slides into Pottersville. Liar's Poker makes you feel like there are no more George Baileys left, and that's a tragic and cynical view indeed. Aspects of bond trading are like the rest of Wall Street finance—one of those deliberately arcane subjects, meant to prevaricate and hoodwink. Michael Lewis gives you a true insider look at what goes on, uniquely positioned with his experience as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers when the firm was the king of trading back in the mid to late 80s. He reveals his serendipitous start and the series of playground-like rituals that governed a new class of "geeks" hell-bent on climbing the ladder to become one of those classic "corporate finance" people. It's a wacky combination of luck, self-aggrandizement, connections, and risk-taking. This story is not meant to be triumphant, yet nor does it fully succeed as a take-down.

In the aftermath of his time at Salomon Brothers, Lewis has enough self-awareness to remark: "Christ, if social contribution had been the measure, I should have been billed rather than paid at the end of the year." He has plenty of ascerbic commentary to go around, yet Liar's Poker simultaneously revels in the posturing and the culture of being on a trading floor: the desire of every trainee to become a BSD (aka Big Swinging Dick (classy, I know)); to ruthlessly demand a bigger bonus in the second or third year of working or threaten to leave the firm (which hordes of Salomon Brothers' employees did); to get away with screwing over as many customers as possible (pat on the back and a fatter paycheck if you exploit their weaknesses!). When Lewis was in the game of bond trading, he very much embodied the things that can seem so awful about investment firms. Much of them twenty-something-year-olds, poised as if on top of the world with a humanitarian streak nowhere to be found. Instead, the streak torrent of self-interest and entitlement harbored by all these individuals left an acrid taste in my mouth, only made less pungent by Lewis's natural humor, sarcasm, and self-deprecation.

This book will work for some people. I much preferred Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine to Liar's Poker. This is really a "me, not you" problem. I find economics can be an interesting topic, but I personally don't think I cared enough about bonds in the way that I felt an abiding interest in the 2008 housing crisis. Here, you can see the disaster (the 2008 one, not just the stock market crash in 1987) in the making: absurdly irresponsible and profligate management while opportunistic ignorance and greed remained supreme. If there's a more positive way to describe Wall Street, please enlighten me...

I can only stomach that kind of subject material for so long. I only want to read about selfish and borderline detestable human beings for so long. The saddest realization is that it feels as if so little has changed or even that it has gone downhill, 30 years after this book has been published. 1980s Wall Street and today's Wall Street do not seem so different. There is always a Next Big Thing that rakes in the cash for the finance/investment industry. The entrance of junk bonds then, subprime mortgage loans in the 2008 crisis. When our stock market is careening up and down because of coronavirus right now and the coming year(s) of our economy look bleak, who knows what Wall Street is conjuring up right now? Experience would dictate that it's probably not good.

By the end of this book, I felt enormously wearied and disillusioned, much the way that Lewis felt when he quit his job. Would that he stayed, he could be much richer and the world would be much poorer. All the respect to him for leaving, but this book has also left me, inevitably, too cynical. I don't care if it's not Christmas right now; I need to go watch It's a Wonderful Life again.

Liar's Poker is that one book everyone possibly has heard of as one of the most funniest books on finance. It is true that I did pick it up for a small introduction to finance. What I read however was an extraordinary account of the corporate world from how they hire to how they make sudden decisions to fire the same employees. The intervening events of trading, how they deal with clients, etc. feature too. Contrary to what I thought, the central focus is not Wall Street but Salamon Inc.

This book can make anyone laugh out loud (not just giggle), and I've never really experienced that with a book before. It begins by describing events of a Salamon training programme for chosen candidates and their journey in becoming "big swinging dicks." Yes, that's the phrase they use, and you'll find it a hundred times. Other catch phrases include equities in dallas, the human piranha, etc.

One of my favorite parts to read was the creation of the mortgage department by Lewis Ranieri within Salamon Inc.; because this department is the single reason USA started securitizing its mortgages to resemble stocks and making ordinary homebuyers a victim of speculations. Anyhow, if one knows enough about the Global Financial Crisis, one can also identify its origin in the mortgage department of Salamon as described in this book. While describing such serious events, Michael does not forget to sprinkle hilarious details such as how much the mortgage department spent on food, and how they stamped over the corporate, government traders.

Altogether, it was one of the most funniest and easiest introductions to finance and big corporates. It offers one of the best explanations to CMOs for real.

A plot is set up, then things happen, and then finally there's a conclusion. That's what makes a story. Right? Wrong.

Michael Lewis is a brilliant writer. He catches the reader's fancy from the get go. But Liar's Poker doesn't really have a plot. It's not based on a singular event -- a market crash, a scam, or whatever. Instead, it's part memoir, part deep look inside the world of investment banking. Or maybe just one investment bank Salomon Brothers, where Lewis worked for ~2 years.

Liar's Poker is a primer into investment banking. He tells it like it is, there's no glorification, and no undue vilification of either the profession or any individual character. He knows how to tell a story, even if there's no plot, and there was not a single page in the book that dragged or felt like it didn't fit.

Most investment bankers, turns out, are just glorified salesmen. Bonds' salesmen, in this particular instance. They call up fund managers and try to feed them shit so that they buy whatever they want to sell. I mean, at least some salesmen do that. Or did that, this book was published decades ago.

Now why would a fund manager buy a bond or some other complex financial instrument out of nowhere 'cause some guy called him to sell it to whom? I really don't know. It's mostly greed. But fund managers do do that (or did that). And the investment banks where these salesmen work are darn fucking rich, so they have darn fucking good images (dapper suits and fancy restaurants help for sure). But the investment banks aren't the fund manager's friends. They're just middlemen with conflicts of interest at every point and you can never be sure of which interest they're furthering at which point in time.

Essentially, unless you're a big, big fish, dealing with investment banks is a massive gamble. They're not out there looking for your interests. As with any agent/broker/middleman.

Lewis intersperses his writing on how investment banks operate with his own moral dilemmas. Bankers love to think that they "deserve" all the money they end up making (hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions, back in the '80s!). Lewis is unambiguous in his thoughts that he didn't deserve it. He gives us a brief insight into his dilemma in the epilogue and I love the measured, reflective individual I see there.

Undoubtedly a classic for the ages. If you know nothing about finance, read this book, google a little, and you'll come out with both knowledge and emotions (and dazzled by the humour).

Ironically (you will understand why once you read the book), this was one of the suggested readings when I was interning with Goldman Sachs.

The book captures the experiences of Michael Lewis as a Salomon bond salesman. But what it includes in more excruciating detail is "the" truth about the glorified Wall Street (using this phrase in a rather generic sense to include markets in other locations as well), and the rise and fall of one of its inhabitants, Salomon Brothers, in the 1970s and 80s.

To be honest, having seen this industry pretty up-close probably makes this review a bit biased. In other words, for me it was not strictly an outsider's view of the world of investment banking. Having said that, however, I feel this book is good enough to capture the attention of the uninitiated, with its honestly brutal details and strikingly realistic delineations.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book:

"That was how a Salomon trader thought: he forgot whatever it was that he wanted to do for a minute and put his finger on the pulse of the market. If the market felt fidgety, if people were scared or desperate, he herded them like sheep into a corner, then made them pay for their uncertainty. He sat on the market until it puked gold coins. Then he worried about what he wanted to do."

"If you ever care to see how all the world's most awful jokes spread, spend a day on a bond trading desk. When the Challenger Space Shuttle disintegrated, six people called me from six points on the globe to explain that NASA stands for Need Another Seven Astronauts."

"Now I admit, even for a geek, it was a little embarrassing to let investors believe their white magic. But as long as the chartists placed their bets with me, my jungle guide explained, the reasoning of our customers was not for me to question."

"Most of the time when markets move, no one has any idea why. A man who can tell a good story can make a good living as a broker... Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever had any clue what the Arabs were doing with their money or why, no story involving Arabs could ever be refuted. So if you didn't know why the dollar was falling, you shouted out something about Arabs."

Loved it! Would definitely recommend it to those who are (or going to be) associated with the world of investment banking.

This was a pretty fun account of life inside a Wall Street bank in the 80's, although I understand it is still somewhat applicable today. The storytelling is good, but I lost some interest in many of the characters and details as the book went on. I also didn't care for the crudeness (heavy amounts of swearing).

I first heard about this book in the early 2000's in an Economics class, so I've wanted to read it for quite some time. It's the 3rd Michael Lewis book I've finished.

Michael Lewis has a podcast, Against the Rules, in which he revisits Liar's Poker. It makes for a great epilogue.

While this is probably Michael Lewis's most famous book, it is not my favorite. Lewis is always an engaging writer, but maybe because this is a recounting of a period of his life, and not an investigation into an exciting mystery or a study of a socialogical phenomenon, it's just not as fascinating as his other works.

The book is interesting, as it follows Lewis's journey from college interviews to working at top investment firm Salomon Brothers. The whole investment banking world is incredibly cutthroat, not surprisingly. The money to be made was incredible, and unfortunately the “snakes” of the world benefited from this. People who could sell worthless stuff for large sums of money were the heroes. People who had the best interests of their customers at heart were the losers.

A problem with this book is that it is somewhat dated—again, because it is a “diary” of time in Lewis's life and not just about an event that exists on its own. Honestly, I probably would have scored this higher and enjoyed it more if Lewis's other books weren't so absolutely fantastic!! Moneyball in particular is one of my favorite books and has been reread until it's somewhat tattered. I've loved every other book by Lewis, so this one suffers in comparison. Still a good read, if you are interested in the “good ol' days” of finance!

Dieses Buch handelt fast ausschließlich von Dingen, die mich noch nie interessiert haben, und ich fand es mit Ausnahme einiger weniger Abschnitte bildend und lustig. (Bildend = man lernt in erster Linie was über Firmenkultur; über die spezifischen Wall-Street-Angelegenheiten nur nebenbei.) Es ist nicht ganz so super wie "Flash Boys" oder "The Undoing Project" vom selben Autor, aber immer noch sehr gut. Ich muss noch mehr von ihm lesen, um vielleicht eines Tages herauszufinden, wie man so was macht.

A great book that is easy to read and informative at the same time. Fun and enlightening. The one part that was a bit lacking in my opinion, was the depth of the explanations given to the financial instruments talked about here. It was nice and simple, one gets what the author is talking about, but it didn't quite satisfy my interest in the subject. Otherwise a great piece to understand Wall Street culture during the 80's.

First book of this type I truly enjoyed. Thank you Lewis for opening up a new field of book to explore.

Rise and fall of Salomon Brothers, the big swinging dicks of wall street!

Very well written by Michael Lewis (also the author of Moneyball and The big short) about the greed and gluttony of the 80's wall street. Lewis gives an insider's perspective of the bond trading floor (also centre of the universe) in this part memoir, right from landing the investment banking job, his training program at Salomon Brothers, and his transformation from a "geek" bond salesman to a big swinging dick.

“That was somewhere near the middle of a modern gold rush. Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did this decade in New York and London.” "If you guys weren't trading bonds, you'd be driving a truck. Don't try to get intellectual in the marketplace. Just trade."

Will highly recommend this (especially if you, like me, aspired to be an Analyst at Goldman Sachs or the likes at some earlier point :P )

Entertaining read that takes a deeper dive into the 1980’s bond markets with comedic commentary. The trading floor environment is well established and the excitement behind risk-filled strategies flows through from real experiences. I would only recommend this to people that have a very basic knowledge of finance lingo and a general understanding of trading because it starts to get “in the weeds” pretty quickly.