I offer the below listing (which you won’t find in my forthcoming book The Buy Side) mostly for those who don’t make a living on the Street, though those who do will recognize the following types.
 
A sales trader, by definition, provides trading assistance, research and market knowledge to his list of buy side clients. To attract more attention from these clients, brokers sometimes get very creative in the services they offer. In my years on the Street I relied on some excellent sales traders – both men and women. But even the great ones rarely represented as much as 25% of my total coverage. On any given day, I’d talk to 100 to 150 sales people.
 

 
Almost without exception, the sales traders I dealt with fit one of the following profiles:
 
1.) Lax Man – Typically, this trader grew up in Jersey, Long Island or maybe Westchester. He was in his late twenties or early thirties. Lax Man was the first guy to ask me if I wanted to get in the March Madness pool. He’d “crushed it” in Vegas the prior weekend and, the night before, the hostess at Stanton Social was “vibing him.” He referred to everyone as Bro, Pal, Chief, Guy or Boss.
 
2.)   Honorary (Wo)Man – She was cute and could trade locker room stories with the best. She used her sex appeal to create business. Behind her back, the guys on her desk would say, “She blows for flow.” But, in reality, she worked hard — harder than most of the men on her desk.  She had something to prove. She knew the business and did an excellent job. She wasn’t married.
 
3.)   Salty Man – He’d been with his firm for twenty years and secretly — or maybe not so secretly — hated me and the business. He still talked in fractions and resisted using email or instant messenger. He’d been divorced three times and didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Odds were, he was going to die on the desk.
 
4.)   No Man – This guy had no research, no flow and no worries. He liked to meet me after work.
 
5.)   Low Man –If I sneezed he’d say “bless you,” if I was tired and hung over he’d worry he’d done something wrong. He worked extremely hard, but the problem was he didn’t get a lot of respect from his own desk.
 
6.)   The Man – He’d answer the phone “250k up – what do you want to do?” Management loved him—he was the busiest guy on Wall Street. All you had to do was ask him. He’d get business done and wears his firm’s crest on his sleeve. He worked for one of the white-shoe investment banks and had gone to one of the best schools. He wound up as an
equity sales trader because he wasn’t smart enough to do something more difficult, but he always spun it that it was his choice to trade.
 
7.)   Family Man – He’d been passed over for several promotions, and was often caught off the desk calling his wife to discuss the twins’ science project. He’d accepted the ceiling in his career; Family Man was honest, calm and genuinely cared about doing the right thing. He tended to whisper.
 
8.)   Script Man – Every mornin he’d call at the exact time using the exact voice from the day before. Early in his career he’d been confused about the business, so he decided to keep it simple. He never cracked a joke in his entire career.
 
9.)   Five Foot Ten Man – He was just a dude, laid back, did a good job, didn’t love the business, but realized he could make twenty times more doing this than being a teacher or going into the family business. We got along great because we both knew we were frauds.
 
10.)   Dr. Serious Man – He had the most important job in the world. Trading stocks and talking about the market were as important as finding a cure for cancer. He’d yell at his wife for calling at 9:15 a.m.; his kids weren’t welcome to pay a surprise visit to the office; and his clients weren’t always right — he was.
 
Do these types still exist on Wall Street’s trading floors?  Wherever there are orders flowing, they can be found.
 

 
 
Right before we went to the printers I received one more blurb for the book.
 
“This is why I keep my money safe and sound under the mattress. You could get high just reading this book. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Wall Street traders.”
–James Patterson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls
 
And I’m so thankful for all of the other people who blurbed for me before. I’m very excited for June 4th…
 
“Turney Duff is a natural storyteller, and his tale of how a naive kid from Maine traded in L.L. Bean for Armani and got sucked into the seamy side of Wall Street is almost impossible to put down. The book is by turns hilarious, harrowing, maddening, and illuminating. After this debut, the smart money will be on Duff.”
–Bethany McLean, New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils Are Here
 
“Turney Duff’s The Buy Side picks up where the Academy Award-winning film about systemic corruption on Wall Street, ‘Inside Job,’ leaves off.  Duff, who at one time was the promising rookie on the trading desk at troubled hedge fund Galleon, gives us a front-row seat to the Street’s dark side – but the tale also features a personal story that will have you cheeringas Duff fights his way through a jungle of excess and figures out what really matters. To all those who want to rule the market not just during business hours but after hours, beware — you may not have Duff’s survival skills.”
–Lawrence G. McDonald, New York Times bestselling author of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense
 
“The Buy Side takes the reader on an extremely wild ride so eloquently and honestly that we never want it to end.  Cocaine wants everything you love and everything that loves you.  Turney Duff had everything and nothing while trading billions of dollars on a razor’s edge. His book takes you from Wall Street to Skid Row to the Thompson Hotel – and then, mercifully, back to sanity and finding a place in the world. Hang on, The Buy Side is gonna move you around, and there are no seatbelts to keep you from getting hit hard.”
–Brian O’Dea, author of High: Confessions of an International Drug Smuggler
 
“The Buy Side is ‘Wall Street’ meets ‘Breaking Bad’ – except that this book is fact not fiction. Turney Duff yields to temptation at every turn, and the sheer volume of criminal behavior he saw, and even participated in, is astonishing…If you want to see Wall Street’s seamy underbelly firsthand, read this book.”
–Frank Partnoy, bestselling author of F.I.A.S.C.O and Infectious Greed
 
“If you took Gordon Gekko, Bud Fox, a copy of Bright Lights, Big City, and threw them in a blender with an ounce of cocaine, a bottle of Patron Tequila, and your favorite teddy bear you’d have yourself a Buy Side smoothie. Turney’s my kind of guy; a madman with heart.  I couldn’t put the book down.”
–Colin Broderick, author of Orangutan
 
“Does Wall Street make people crazy or are crazy people simply attracted to Wall Street?  The Buy Side doesn’t get us any closer to answering that question, but along the way we get a look inside perhaps the most ethically-challenged investment firm in recent memory, and a harrowing journey through drug addiction and recovery.  This is not a musical comedy; at the end, you’re just relieved that Duff is alive.”
–Jared Dillian, author of Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers
 
“Turney Duff’s The Buy Side is the perfect parable for Wall Street’s lost decade. Duff’s account of his rise and fall has it all, from a fast-paced coke-crazed trip through Manhattan nightlife that conjures Bright Lights, Big City, to an eyewitness account of insider trading and front running that reads like a federal indictment. Broke but not broken, Duff ends up better than others on Wall Street have–sober, chastened, and lucky to be alive after the self-destructive excesses of easy money and empty ambition.”
-Guy Lawson, New York Times bestselling author of Octopus