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

Incredible book, well written and entertaining. First chapters are the best, it becomes a bit slower after, but still super entertaining.

Interesting account on the shark-dominated world of Wall Street which shows once more how white-collar crime remains one step ahead of the law. A world where information is more precious than oil and greed is its fuel. On the downside, the narration is a bit flat at times - although at least in part due to the factual type of account - and introduces too many characters which don't seem necessary to the story. Yet a quality informative read.

Black Edge tells the story of how Stevie Cohen had people competing to invest in his funds and how it took years for the regulators to successfully prosecute him for insider trading by which time the $1.8 billion settlement he paid out was chump change! The tale is engaging and informative about the early days of the Hedge Fund industry that benefited from the market deregulation of the early 1990s on Wall Street. A compelling read!

Written very well, very easy to follow and would suggest it to anyone interested in how some hedge funds operate and make money

Absolutely great read. If this hasn't been made into a film, it should be. Wall Street 3, Boiler Room 2 perhaps. You don't need to be a genius at understanding financial markets and terminology to read this either. All very well written, well explained and easy to understand. It demonstrates the difference between illegal and immoral if you take a few moments to consider what you are reading and how some big headline cases have actually resulted in zero prosecutions. The burden of proof is high as is the fear of failure due to the risk associated with failed prosecutions.

A great read however around a third of the book the pages were torn and smashed in (examples below). Would normally return but for the sake of £6 it isn't worth the hassle. However, it is still disappointing that this was even deemed fit for sale and sent out.

Easy to read, thriller which offers fantastic insight to a band of opaque hedge funds and how they operate. The book shows up the archaic US legal system, the blurriness between right and wrong in the eyes of law and how those with enough resources can get ahead / around the legal order. It also offers some insight into US law enforcement agencies rivalries, and how they prepare for cases (right from plea deals, to strategies around opening ("the grab") and closing arguments. Overall, well researched, well written, and well worth reading.

Interesting read in that it presented a thorough reporting of the events as occurred and in the end makes you wonder what exactly is insider trading to the extent that is a provable offence that can be punished. That the firm still exists under a different name and now has outside money is a testament to the fact that money talks and B walks

This story unfolds like a detective novel as the police try to bring down their criminal, but also is a very interesting insight into hedge funds, or at least the more corrupt ones. If you like business stories (such as The Big Short) thus fits right in and the fluent writing style just makes it flow so well. You don't have to be in the field to find this stuff interesting, but of course if you are it may also help pull you in.

Very good narrative! a usefull reading for law-enforcement agents

Sheelah Kolhatkar’s Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street is the story of what may be the most important insider trading case of all time. The case against Steven Cohen and SAC Capital is complicated and involves a lot of different people. Although prosecutors were able to make a case against some of Cohen’s traders, they were never able to conclusively prove that Cohen himself traded on inside information. This book illustrates the difficulty in prosecuting insider trading.

This book is really well written and you can get absolutely hooked in the first 20-30 pages. Its absolutely astonishing that the leader of this hedge fund couldn't be charged and is currently back in business. Exposes everything we generally know and hate about wall street.

The 2009 arrest of Raj Rajaratnam of the Galleon Group was the start of a long trail of insider trading prosecutions that culminated in the prosecution of SAC Capital. The SEC had identified Steve Cohen as the worst of the insider trading hedge funds and the SEC put his SAC Capital in its cross-hairs. It convinced the Justice Department to prosecute the offenders with criminal charges. Sheelah Kolhatkar tells the tale in Black Edge. Ms. Kolhatkar was a hedge fund analyst and is now a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about Wall Street, Silicon Valley and politics among other things. She shows a keen understanding of traders and regulators, and conveys the story into a page-turner. I know what happens in the end to SAC Capital and Steve Cohen. I knew some of the insider trading prosecutions. I never appreciated how all of those prosections from 2009 to 2014 were tied together. Matthew Martoma plays one of the biggest roles in the story. He was a former trader at SAC Capital who was caught red-handed on insider information about negative results from a drug trial. His source, a doctor working on the trial, passed Martoma the information. Martoma made SAC Capital a lot of money on that information and Steve Cohen profited handsomely. What the feds really wanted was for Martoma to implicate Cohen in exchange for a lesser sentence. I won’t spoil the end for you. Besides Rajaratnam and Maratoma, the feds brought cases against Michael Steinberg, a portfolio manager at SAC, Anthony Chaisson of Level Gobal and Todd Newman of Diamondback Capital. It was this last one that lead to the undoing of some of the ability to prosecute insider trading. The Newman appellate decision slapped tighter requirements on the government when trying to prosecute an insider trading case. Black Edge is well worth the time if you have any interest in the area.