Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, And The Quest To Bring Down The Most Wanted Man On Wall Street Quotes
"I just got ripped off by my wife. I’m going to make it all back by cutting your payouts."
"Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win."
"Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it."
"If there’s a chance that a single piece of news could send a stock plunging, investors expect greater possible profit."
"It’s about how hedge funds like SAC were carefully structured so that the people at the top were protected from the questionable dealings of the employees below."
"He wasn’t cool and didn’t have women paying attention to him, but he had earned the respect of the trust fund kids he was in school with."
"I knew he was going to be famous within a week. I never saw talent like that. It was just staring at you."
"Cohen was so good at it that traders at other firms began tracking what he was doing."
"By the time he founded SAC, Cohen could finally afford to be there."
"There seemed to be big IPOs for new dotcom companies every day, creating new millionaires who were lionized on magazine covers."
"Investment banks are hierarchies structured much like the military, where everyone must salute the person with the most stripes—or the department that brings in the most money."
"The new way to command power in the financial industry was to start a hedge fund."
"These hedge funds weren’t under the big regulatory umbrella, they didn’t always have real compliance departments, and the philosophy was to hire anyone who could make money trading, regardless of how they did it."
"The FBI felt that it needed the same tools it had used to investigate the Mob."
"It was understood that information already in the public domain, like a company’s SEC filings or earnings releases, was essentially worthless for trading purposes."
"In a way, Martoma was re-creating his childhood dynamic at his new firm, trying to please his demanding fathers, Cohen and Grossman."
"The SEC had only minimal information about them. Given all this, what did Kang think was going to happen?"
"Even by the money-obsessed standards of Wall Street, SAC’s extravagance stood out."
"There was almost no time in a twenty-four-hour day Cohen didn’t use for a moneymaking purpose."
"Because Cohen’s time was so valuable, most activities were scheduled so as not to distract him."
"Cohen was so focused on making sure that he had access to every piece of available information."
"Every Sunday around noon, Cohen sat down at his desk in his home office with a yellow notepad."
"The traders who worked directly for Cohen were called 'execution traders'."
"Cohen’s trader promised to pay them back with future commissions."
"No one ever got the better end of a deal with Stevie Cohen."
"Cohen, who was normally impervious to feelings of panic, started warning his traders and portfolio managers against taking too much risk."
"Wall Street regulators were beginning to understand that if they wanted to bring order to the financial industry, funds like SAC would have to come under far more intensive scrutiny."
"Gilman didn’t need the money—the university paid him $310,000 a year."
"The medical profession was being infiltrated by Wall Street, as more and more physicians were drawn into the web of high finance as paid sources for money managers."
"Cohen liked to position analysts and portfolio managers with different opinions against one another."
"Cohen’s confidence in Martoma’s views on bapi was buttressed when Martoma arranged a private dinner at Cohen’s Greenwich mansion."
"The stock would dive $3. Cohen would have made $3 million, while the Bear trader lost $900,000, Morgan $1.5 million."
"Martoma was starting to feel like Munno was trying to sabotage his career by going behind his back and sowing doubts about him with Cohen."
"The press was also eager to publish stories about traders accused of breaking the law—there was no more perfect villain."
"Hollander was fired—which made him, potentially, an ideal cooperator."
"The market doesn’t like a drug that only helps half the population."
"In spite of their differences, the two FBI agents were in agreement on one thing: that there was enough evidence developing to go beyond Rajaratnam and his immediate circle and mount a much broader attack on the hedge fund industry."
"The arguments in favor were obvious: an end to corruption across a powerful industry that had been operating largely in the dark."
"Well, the FBI agents said, the more people they pursued and the more witnesses they flipped, the greater the possibility that someone would start to talk."
"Lying to a federal agent is a separate crime," Klein reminded Lee.
"Initially, Lee and Far were reluctant to admit they had done anything illegal, which was the first step of cooperating."
"I didn’t do anything," Lee said. "I went to Taiwan to meet with companies, but I didn’t get revenue numbers."
"One of the first things Lee and Far had to do was close their fund down without drawing undue suspicion from their friends on Wall Street."
"While Rajaratnam ran a major hedge fund, it increasingly looked to the government like SAC Capital was the sun that everyone else was orbiting."
"Cohen could see what everyone around him was doing, while all the others stayed isolated from one another."
"If Cohen caught someone making a trade before giving the idea to him, he became infuriated."
"You think my fund is dirty? You should check out what SAC is doing."
"Was all of this effort, the months of wiretaps and flips and working late, and all the evidence, in the end just about charging Rajaratnam and a couple of his friends?"
"The next steps in building the expert network case were straightforward enough: They needed more wiretaps."
"You two need to talk," he said. He told Kang and Makol in no uncertain terms that they were not to come out until they had made up.
"The FBI had learned about Cohen’s Sunday Ideas Meetings, during which his portfolio managers called him to talk about their trading ideas for the week."
"Once someone lied, the FBI had a hook in them for a perjury case."
"If you really believe that I shared confidential information and you have tapes of my calls, then it’s likely I did it, but I didn’t mean to."
"Getting someone to flip was like training for a long-distance run. You had to build up to it."
"His father’s anger drove him to a stunning act of paternal cruelty."
"Martoma proved skilled at cultivating mentors, particularly male ones, who served as surrogate father figures."
"He had spent the time since his last contact with Martoma, in fact, trying to forget the whole Elan thing had happened."
"Cohen had struggled over the decision of whether to testify or take the Fifth in response to the SEC."
"The crime could result in a prison term of ten years. Nobody took a sentence like that for someone else."
"He was confident that he was finally putting this nightmare behind him."
"His understanding was that he was disclosing inside information and that was against the law. He understood he was committing a crime."
"This happened on our watch, and we are responsible for that misconduct."
"The idea that Cohen could run his business in such a haphazard style didn’t seem plausible to most of the investigators in the room."
"Steven Cohen and Mathew Martoma talked for twenty minutes on Sunday. Right after the phone call, Martoma emails Cohen the lists of the total number of shares in every account."
"There is not, and never was, and never will be, any discussion of Steve Cohen taking care of us."
"He has been framed. Who made the money? Somebody made $275 million, and they put all the blame on Mathew!"
"Steve is a very serious, very astute collector."
"The government had made its best effort to bring one of the wealthiest men in the world to justice and left him largely in the same condition he had been in before."
"This creates an obvious road map for unscrupulous behavior."
"The financial industry has evolved to be so complex that large parts of it are almost completely beyond the reach of regulators and law enforcement."
"Wall Street’s most successful enterprises are constantly pushing into the frontier; every time the law looks like it’s catching up, they move farther away."
"All that was left was for Cohen to spend his billions and to plan for his return."
"When you stand in front of it, you’re blown away."
"There is not, and never was, and never will be."