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HomeUpdate: David Slaine Pleads Guilty
Posted by Larry Doyle on February 2nd, 2010 10:02 PM |
GUILTY!!
Wall Street master of the universe David Slaine has now been reduced to just another in a long line of Wall Street crooks.
God forbid one tries to make an honest living in the financial industry.
I first wrote about Slaine on January 17th. At that point, I wondered whether Slaine’s cover as a government mole in the ongoing insider trading investigation on Wall Street had been blown by The Wall Street Journal. Was somebody trying to out Slaine in order to distract or derail the ongoing investigation?
We may never know. What we do know now is that Slaine had already pled guilty at that point.
Reuters reports today, Ex-NY Fund Manager Slaine Pleads Guilty: >> (more…)
Who Is David Slaine?
Posted by Larry Doyle on January 17th, 2010 7:45 AM |
Editor’s Note: Please see LD’s update to this fascinating story just published on Tuesday evening February 2nd at 10:02 PM.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
I have written previously on the importance of strong relationships while working on Wall Street. While the Wall Street numbers and dollars are voluminous, ultimately Wall Street is a ‘people business.’
I have also written previously how ‘information is everything’ on Wall Street. Traders work tirelessly to determine what is moving or what will move the market. Utilizing this information, millions of dollars can be made or lost in the course of a very short time span.
Combining these two critically important factors, it should be no surprise how some will use – but then abuse – these two primary cornerstones of our financial industry.
Folllowing this line of reasoning, are you ever shocked when a guy who cheats on his wife also then cheats on his girlfriend? Where am I going with this? Let’s enter the world of David Slaine, the government’s mole in the insider trading scandal currently rocking Wall Street. (more…)
Fatal Character Flaws Bring Down Wall Street Titans
Posted by Larry Doyle on October 20th, 2009 8:49 AM |
Raj Rajaratnam
How is it that an individual with untold hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth could put himself in a position of risking it all?
Welcome to the world of Raj Rajaratnam, the owner of the hedge fund Galleon and the major kingpin arrested in the most recent insider trading scandal to rock Wall Street.
Who is Raj Rajaratnam and why would he take such professional risks? We learn about Rajaratnam from a London based financial site, Here Is The City:
He was born in Sri Lanka, attended S. Thomas’ Preparatory School, Kollupitiya, then moved to England to complete his schooling, and studied engineering at the University of Sussex. Rajaratnam earned an MBA from Wharton in 1983. He is married with three children.
Rajaratnam, a Tamil self-made billionaire hedge fund manager, is the 236th richest American according to Forbes (2009), with an estimated net worth of $1.8 billion.
The hedge fund manager started his career as an analyst at the investment banking boutique Needham & Co., where his focus was on electronics. In 1991, he became the President of the bank at the age of 34. At the company’s behest, he started a hedge fund, Needham Emerging Growth Partnership in March 1992, which he later bought and renamed ‘Galleon’.
Initially invested in technology stocks and healthcare companies, he says his best ideas come from frequent visits with companies and conversations with executives who invest in his fund.
He has made more than $20 million in charitable donations in the last five years. In September 2009, Rajaratnam pledged to donate $1m to help the Sri Lankan government with the rehabilitation of former LTTE combatants. He has also donated generously to clear land mines in the war-affected areas in Sri Lanka, and was also a contributor to various causes that promoted development in the Indian subcontinent and programs that benefited lower income South Asian youth in the New York area. (more…)
October 19, 1987 — October 19, 2009: Deja Vu All Over Again?
Posted by Larry Doyle on October 19th, 2009 1:43 PM |
TIME magazine cover December 1, 1986. What has really changed on Wall Street?
Twenty-two years ago today the equity markets crashed. The Dow Jones Industrial average cratered by a whopping 22%!!
Have our markets, economy, and financial regulatory oversight progressed, regressed, or is it merely “deja vu all over again?” Well, with the markets up 1% on the day and 50% off the lows in March of this year, clearly today is vastly different than 22 years ago, right? Honestly, I would maintain that from a grand perspective very little has changed. Why? How?
As much as we may have made technological progress on a number of fronts both on and off Wall Street, the fraud implicit in the illegal use of information is still very much central to the corruption that occurs on Wall Street.
Back in the mid to late ’80s, insider trading activity was rampant in a number of hedge funds and leveraged buyout activities. The so-called king of Wall Street at that time was Ivan Boesky. As it turns out, Boesky was nothing more than a common criminal involved in a massive insider trading scandal. When Boesky was confronted with the evidence of his criminal activities, he turned on his cronies and sang like a canary. In relatively short order, some of Wall Street’s titans fell like dominoes. Who were some of these titans? Dennis Levine, Robert Freeman, Martin Siegel, and Michael Milken. These masters of the universe were nothing more than white collar criminals.
Fast forward to 2009. The markets are rebounding and Wall Street is back to ‘business as usual.’ In a manner of speaking, the ‘business as usual’ is no different than the business that occurred back in the ’80s. What business is that? Insider trading.
The story that broke on Friday in which a number of individuals at a few hedge funds supported by corporate insiders at IBM and Intel is certainly only the tip of the iceberg of insider trading circa 2009. Bloomberg addresses this certainty in writing, U.S. Said to Target Waves of Insider-Trading Activities:
Federal investigators are gearing up to file charges against a wider array of insider-trading networks, some linked to the criminal case against billionaire hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam that shook Wall Street last week, people familiar with the matter said.
The pending crackdown, based on at least two years of investigation, targets securities professionals including hedge- fund managers, lawyers and other Wall Street players, the people said, declining to be identified because the cases aren’t public. Some probes, like the one focused on Rajaratnam, rely on wiretaps. Others stem from a secret Securities and Exchange Commission data-mining project set up to pinpoint clusters of people who make similar well-timed stock investments.
I am sure there are individuals going home today wondering if their illicit activities will be, or already have been, detected.
Fraud driven by greed is a timeless activity made only more prevalent by an industry which has corrupted itself by diluting its regulatory oversight.
October 19, 2009 . . . deja vu all over again.
LD
