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The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort
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The Wolf of Wall Street

by Jordan Belfort

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Dreadful self-aggrandizing and poorly written look into Jordan Belfort's sleazy life. Read the first couple of chapters then skimmed a few pages of the others. Not recommended to anyone. ( )
  CarterPJ | Dec 7, 2011 |
When I was reading this book I wasn't sure whether I believed everything Belfort was writing, but after about fifty pages I stopped caring and sat back and enjoyed the dazzling experiences that were unfurled before me. His style was aggressive but had some genuinely tender moments, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book as an expose of life in the fast line. It was refreshing to see the lack of remorse that Belfort held for some of his actions, a trait I think that clogs up too many 'celebrity' memoirs. ( )
  Wubsy | Mar 5, 2009 |
Jordan Belfort was living proof of the American dream in the heady days of Wall Street. Nicknamed the "Wolf of Wall Street", he lived in a fabulous mansion, with his beautiful wife and child, flew his helicopter, indulged in copious amounts of drugs, all while running a busy brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmount, which he had founded.

Stratton Oakmount found fame as one of the biggest "boiler room" brokerage firms. Belfort was eventually convicted of selling purpotedly profitable stocks at inflated prices and spent two years in jail. This book attempts to tell the tale of his high life and how it all fell apart around him as his drug addiction spiralled out of control.

There is no doubting what this man, and his company did, was odious. But as you read the book, what really comes across are Belfort's superb skills as a salesman and motivator. This is evident in every description of his motivational sessions at Stratton Oakmount, and even later when he was in rehab. You can only imagine what he was like to listen to in real life.

Also apparent from the book is the scale of Jordan's intelligence. He comes across as quite a clever person, who however, devoted a significant part of his life to circumventing stock trading laws. His descrption of how he bugged the SEC personnel who were investigating his books is quite amusing and novel.

His descriptions of his drug taking make you realise how easy it can be for an intelligent person to persuade themselves that their drug problem is under control not a problem at all.

This book is quite a quick-paced, interesting and amusing read. Granted, the subject matter is unpleasant to some, but it is entertaining and quite an interesting insight into the mind of Jordan Belfort. ( )
  dudara | Nov 7, 2008 |
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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0553384775, Paperback)

By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited for him at home, and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called…

In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astounding and hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess no one could invent.
Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, Stratton Oakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game as Belfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stock buys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits–for the house. But an insatiable appetite for debauchery, questionable tactics, and a fateful partnership with a breakout shoe designer named Steve Madden would land Belfort on both sides of the law and into a harrowing darkness all his own.

From the stormy relationship Belfort shared with his model-wife as they ran a madcap household that included two young children, a full-time staff of twenty-two, a pair of bodyguards, and hidden cameras everywhere—even as the SEC and FBI zeroed in on them—to the unbridled hedonism of his office life, here is the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down…


From the Hardcover edition.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 04 Jan 2013 07:25:27 -0500)

(see all 3 descriptions)

Belfort, who founded one of the first and largest chop shop brokerage firms in 1987, was banned from the securities business for life by 1994, and later went to jail for fraud and money-laundering, delivers a memoir that reads like fiction. It covers his decade of success with straightforward accounts of how he worked with managers of obscure companies to acquire large amounts of stock with minimal public disclosure, then pumped up the price and sold it, so he and the insiders made large profits while public investors usually lost. Profits were laundered through purchase of legitimate businesses and cash deposits in Swiss banks.… (more)

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