The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media and Manipulation
Author: Howard Kurtz
List Price: $15.00
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ISBN: 0684868806
Publisher: Free Press (05 June, 2001)
Sales Rank: 156,151
Average Customer Rating: 3 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 4 out of 5
Reads like a novel, enlightening for investors
If you invest at all - stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc. - you need to read this book. Howard Kurtz has the inside track on the investment bankers, mutual fund managers, and the financial press, with insight into what the real agendas are - and therefore, who you can really trust. He gives fascinating details of the celebrities in the financial reporting world, from cable news channels devoted to business reporting, to the publishing world and the movers and shakers on Wall Street - and most importantly, who's really driving the show, who the analysts are really working for, who the brokers are pressured by, and why analysts who downgrade stocks are usually fired. The book is filled with plenty of anecdotes, details of who owns what, who works for who, who's related to or dating who, where the unusual friendships have created unexpected channels of information, and how the financial reporting business is influenced and controlled by special interests that may surprise you - but that make complete sense once Kurtz explains it all.
If you want to read "between the lines" in the financial reporters to see the truth and decipher the actual future of the market, this book is required reading to help figure out where the truth is coming from, and where the truth is not.
Not to mention - it's just plain fascinating. This book reads like a fascinating dramatic novel.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Interesting but not needed for the home collection
This book offered some interesting insight into how analyst news and forecasts effect the stock market. The main message I came away with is "don't believe the hype". If you are looking to bolster your confidence in your own ability to make stock picks in the face of contridictory market analysts then take the time to listen to this book. If you're not interested in an autobiogrophy of famous Wall Street gurus then skip it. You can get the same information and much more valuable insight from reading some of the Peter Lynch books.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Too much James Cramer, not enough Wall Street
This is mostly a minibio of James Cramer with a lot of attention paid on the side to CNBC and Maria Bartiromo specifically. If you're very interested in Cramer, you can just go get his actual memoir. As for me, I am interested in Wall Street and the system of disseminating and evaluating information and opinion about stocks -- the conflicts of interest, the conventions, the legal rules, the strengths and weaknesses. I don't know how you can analyze those issues without spending time on the role and motivations of key research analysts, the position of the SEC and the communication conventions between companies and journalists, hedge fund and other money managers and the SEC. Any book claiming to treat these issues and focusing on 1998-2000 would have to deal extensively by the phenomenon represented by Mary Meeker and Harry Blodgett, which this book does not. The book focuses disproportionately and without explanation on a few TV personalities without treating the overall issue. Too bad for me. It would have been fine if the title had been accurate -- something about James Cramer. Or even "Crazy Days at CNBC."
The data does not synthesize into any larger recommendation or theme. It comes across as an accurate chronology without analysis. The writing style is correspondingly dry.
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