Backstage Wall Street

 by Joshua M. Brown

I didn’t know who Josh Brown was before I was given a copy of this book to review, so I wasn’t familiar with what he was all about. I’d never read his popular blog (still haven’t) and didn’t know what to expect from this book. As I started reading and well towards the middle of the book, I kept telling myself this could only be a two star book. This guy’s just telling a bunch of his stories from the trenches of Wall Street while not imparting any real, valuable information. And as the half way mark, I was still waiting for whatever investor advice he was going to impart from “backstage”. But such advice never comes. Thankfully, at the halfway point we found out why when he comes out and tells us: this isn’t a book about investing.

Finally knowing that, I was able to relax and enjoy the book. I began to appreciate Brown’s insight into some of the inner workings of the business of investment and how other people make money off of my money. I began to understand a lot of esoteric concepts related to fairly common things, such as IRA’s, ETF’s, 12b-1 fees, and so forth. Brown’s experience and candor may not help you invest better, but what he has to say may still make you a better investor. That’s because his information makes you want to ask some questions – possibly of your broker, definitely of yourself – and those answers should give you better investment judgment. It was certainly eye-opening seeing the world of stocks from a salesman/broker/sweat shop point of view, and the reading was, though not engrossing, at least enjoyable.

My two complaints about this book are minor. The first is that this book sounds a lot like a blog. As a dyed in the wool blogger, Brown can be disjointed and sometimes lacks good flow from chapter to chapter. He’s at his best when he’s writing jab-like sentences to make a short, right-to-the-heart-of-the-matter point, in other words, he’s effective when he writes like a blogger. When he writes like a Wall Street insider telling a story, his prose tends to breaks down, sounding quite unconvincing and contrived at times. My other complaint is how he uses asterisks in bad words. Maybe I’m wrong, but in a book like this, there really isn’t anybody to protect by putting an asterisk between an ‘s’, an ‘h’, and a ‘t’. Swear like a stock broker, if that’s what you are! I’m okay with it, buddy.

At various other points in reading this book, I felt it was a two, three, or four dollars sign work. Just when I decided I would give it four marks, Brown trots out a gratuitous section of famous Wall Street insiders echoing his points and expressing their similar views to his. It sounded like an artificial scaffold of ideological support for an insecure author (or a blogger trying to turn writer). That bumped it down to just above average, and into the three dollar sign range. “Backstage” is still quite different from other books on Wall Street, so it will appeal to most anyone with a passing interest in investing.