Wall Street's Shame
- the Nasdaq Triple Waterfall Collapse
Excerpts from Chapter 5
- "Surviving Wall Street's Predators" and other parts of the book.

.... investors had no idea of the scale of fortunes quietly being accumulated by their heroes in Silicon Valley and Wall Street.....

Through the leverage effect of stock options and the public's avidity for Initial Public Offerings in which entrepreneurs could sell a fraction of their company and mark up their holdings gigantically, billionaires ­ and near-billionaires ­ were created in time periods of four years and less.

Moreover, most of these fabulously rich newcomers didn't get that way by building something of enduring value, as had such "robber barons" as John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, or J.P. Morgan.

Gary Winnick made $735 million from Global Crossing in the three years before the company went bankrupt. Joseph Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest, and Philip Anschutz, a co-founder, made a combined $1.8 billion in sales of stock before the price collapsed.

Wall Street is not a seething den of corruption. But it isn't a safe place for the unwary either. Investor survival means taking Wall Street seriously and not letting Wall Street take you—seriously.

As Churchill said, "The farther backwards you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see."

This book is meant to be a practical Investor's Survival Guide, which means its extensive discussion of past folly is not just history for the curious to savor.

It is market lore every investor can use, like the lore accumulated over centuries that sustains users of the wilderness.

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