Trader Monthly’s Lane Gets Stuck in His Own ‘Jealousy Machine’
"The Zeroes"
Penguin Group via Bloomberg
The cover jacket of "The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane." The book is the latest by Randall Lane.
The cover jacket of "The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane." The book is the latest by Randall Lane. Source: Penguin Group via Bloomberg
Randall Lane
Penguin Group via Bloomberg
Author Randall Lane. "The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane" is the latest book by Lane.
Author Randall Lane. "The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane" is the latest book by Lane. Source: Penguin Group via Bloomberg
Magazine maker Randall Lane built a career out of what he came to call “the jealousy machine.”
Then the machinery chewed him up and spat him out, as he shows in “The Zeroes,” a farcical memoir of how Lane’s Trader Monthly and other glossy tributes to financial stars made him a Wall Street insider and lost him $530,000.
Lane, a former Washington bureau chief for Forbes, didn’t set out to become a cheerleader for hubris. He began his trip into the land of high rollers with an offhand idea from a Canadian-born trader, Magnus Greaves: Why not create a publication devoted to the buy-and-sell set?
Advertisers would love the homogenous audience of alpha males earning six figures or more, Lane figured. Traders, for their part, would warm to a publication that glamorized their work, winnings and silver Ferraris.
Over some Bass ales at Tao in midtown Manhattan, Lane got Greaves, his business partner, to sum up what motivates the desk jockeys with the Franck Muller watches. Then Lane distilled the trading ethos into six words scribbled on a cocktail napkin: “See It, Make It, Spend It.”
It was 2004, and the slogan soon spawned content ranging from trading strategies to the joys of gluttony, including a column called “The 5,000 Calorie Meal.” A driving force would be the desire of big earners to know how they were doing relative to their peers, a preoccupation Lane first encountered while reporting for the Forbes 400 list.
“Most of all, we would feed the anxiety, by publishing and celebrating, what the top dogs made -- the Trader Monthly 100.”
Maybachs and Moet
Before long, their upstart Doubledown Media LLC was throwing parties featuring Maybachs, Moet & Chandon bubbles, lithe dancers on a trapeze, and a faux James Brown in gold lame.
By 2007, Doubledown would add a boxing match for charity at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, where traders from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bear Stearns Cos. slugged it out before guests dressed in Armani tuxedos and Brioni suits. As Lane gazed at the pugilists, ring-card girls and roaring crowd, he settled on an apt name for the decade, “the Zeroes.”
“Wall Street’s breathless pursuit of zeroes, that easy money mentality, had permeated every aspect of our culture,” Lane writes. “In my role as Wall Street’s scorekeeper, I too had fallen prey to the mind warp.”
As that last comment suggests, Lane presents himself as the dazed victim of “the kind of greedfest that comes along only once every thousand years.” Yet he also fed the bonfire, as Doubledown added more magazines extolling indulgence and finance, including Dealmaker, Private Air and the Cigar Report.
Travolta Flap
Lane faults and excuses himself by turns. On one occasion, he allows John Travolta to nix more than 100 photos taken for a cover shot of Private Air. On another, he asks his lifestyle editor to avoid criticizing advertisers’ products.
“I knew this was a long way away from my days at Forbes, but I also knew that the other option was bankruptcy.”
His ultimate self-pardon: He grew up in a suburban house abutting the Rockefeller estate in New York’s Westchester County. “My middle-class nose had been pressed up firmly to the glass of American wealth and power from birth.”
Keeping up with the moneyed class proves a dicey business for Lane, whose quest to keep Doubledown afloat draws him into a circle of characters that could have come straight out of a potboiler. Trader Monthly’s first big advertiser was Refco Inc. Chief Executive Phillip Bennett, who was later sentenced to 16 years in prison for cheating investors out of $2.4 billion.
Peter Max
Pop artist Peter Max turns up to paint portraits of hedge- fund heavies including John Paulson. Baseball star-turned- stock-picker Lenny Dykstra arrives with a business plan and multiple laptops. A source called the Candyman -- Lane’s Deep Throat on what hedgies are earning -- expects to be treated to a “proper” night out, at a strip club where the bill runs to almost $10,000.
The gossipy narrative proceeds apace with the lacquered language favored by magazine writers. Characters don’t just eat and drink, they “tuck into” Dover sole and “throw back” Chopin vodka. Yet Lane can be vivid, as when he describes short seller James Chanos, “his lips pursed as if he were passing an oddly shaped kidney stone.”
It’s hard to feel sorry for Lane, even when the meltdown forces Doubledown to file for Chapter 7 liquidation in February 2009. Yet he’s right to note that Wall Street hasn’t changed its ways just because his magazines are no longer around to glorify the excesses. For those who still wonder what got into Americans during the decade of housing helium, this beach read of a book is a fine place to start.
“The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane” is from Portfolio (359 pages, $27.95). To buy this book in North America, click here.
(James Pressley writes for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer on the story: James Pressley in Brussels at jpressley@bloomberg.net.
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