Dumb Money: Adventures of a Day Trader - Hardcover

Wolf, Gary; Anuff, Joey

3.42

38 ratings by Goodreads

9780375503887: Dumb Money: Adventures of a Day Trader

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375503889 ISBN 13: 9780375503887

Publisher: Random House, 2000

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As you read this, five million Americans are day-trading. Not since gold was discovered in California have more people dropped out of their old lives and come running for the promise of a big score. For a time, Joey Anuff was among them. He has emerged-enriched, enlightened, and exhausted-to share his story.

In a marriage of Anuff's own experiences with the brilliant investigative work of his Wired and Suck colleague Gary Wolf, Dumb Money explores and explains the world of day-trading as has never been done before. No strategy is too crackpot to try, no news break too dubious to play off, no so-called guru too shady, no online chat room too pathetic. Using the rhythms of a day trader's typical day as its frame, Dumb Money is a dispatch from the front lines of the stock-market revolution, a brutally Darwinian battleground on which some become wildly rich and more become part of the body count. It is essential reading for online investors, off-line investors, voyeurs, concerned citizens, and adrenaline freaks alike.

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Review:

Could it be? Is it possible that day trading--the hottest thing to hit the market since analysts started forecasting stock movements by the heft of Alan Greenspan's briefcase--is simply a bait-and-switch that promises unlimited riches but delivers only aggravation? Joey Anuff, cofounder of the Suck.com humor Web site, certainly thinks so. With a literary assist from Wired magazine's Gary Wolf, he takes us into the belly of the beast in Dumb Money. And his rollercoaster first-person account of the day trading life graphically shows that while this highly romanticized world may be consistently exciting and occasionally quite profitable, it sure ain't pretty.

Set to the tempo of a trading day that begins each dawn in Anuff's San Francisco apartment, the book chronicles an existence fueled by CNBC and Starbucks and has little room for anything else. Envious of the vast riches that everyone else seems to be accumulating, Anuff jumps into the abyss full-bore to the detriment of his personal life, his regular job, and even his sanity. Through witty writing and self-effacing irony, he shows why he stayed glued to his keyboard each day until the closing bell, repeatedly risking tens of thousands on stocks he couldn't even recall a few weeks later. Along the way, he introduces us to several top players in the game, and explains how everything from discount brokerages to Web message boards affect the action. A true cautionary tale, it's recommended for anyone who has ever read about a trader's million-dollar day and seriously wondered, "Why not me?" --Howard Rothman

From the Back Cover:

Advance Praise for Dumb Money

"Joey Anuff and Gary Wolf have done the impossible: Dumb Money, an early-21st century crossbreed of Dostoyevsky (The Gambler), Matt Groening (Homer Simpson), and the Motley Fools, fully conveys the addictive, populist thrill of online stock trading, but also stands as a cautionary tale about a certain kind of life--twitchy, sweaty, lonely--on the internet."
-- Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century and co-chairman,

Powerful Media

"Read Dumb Money and never again will you worship at the shrine of day traders or most any other Wall Street or Web guru. It is easy to be irreverent, you say? Yes, but it isn't easy to be funny, or wise, or to write so effortlessly. This is Bright Lights, Big City without the cocaine but with the highs felt when a writer captures a moment of mass insanity."
-- Ken Auletta

"Dumb Money is the truest and most entertaining book about the allure of seemingly easy money since Edwin Lefevre's classic, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. Fusing a riveting and often hilarious personal narrative with a contemporary history of the rise of day trading, Anuff and Wolf cut through the frustrating mix of hype and horror that envelops most writing about the stock market. This is a clear-eyed and painfully honest book, and ultimately a moving one as well. Day trading is now responsible for at least one good thing."
-- James Surowiecki, Slate.com

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