By Joe Kolman
Harriman House
272 pages; $25.00
If you are headed to the beach for a break this winter, or just want a quick read on the train, this is the book to take. Joe Kolman’s Naked Option is a fun read, steeped in Wall Street speak and lore, mixing just the right amount of believable suspense with misbehaving (and kinky) traders.
Kolman, who founded the now-defunct Derivatives Strategy magazine, is now a vice president at AllianceBernstein Investments. He uses his knowledge of the street and options trading to write a suspenseful yarn about a good trader gone bad (tut-tut, overtrading and then putting it in a customer’s account), losing his job and crawling back from the brink by investigating and uncovering a complicated trading scheme at a huge investment bank.
Kolman has an eye for the Wall Street trader, and doesn’t flinch in his descriptions. Traders come in all shapes, sizes and male chauvinist attitudes, it seems. From the cock sure non-failing super trader to the just cocky trader, most types fill the pages here. Although there is a strong alpha-male attitude penetrating the trading rooms of Wall Street, this book also looks at the still-in-the-closet world of gay traders. This is perhaps an unexpected turn, for when our hero isn’t exploring the new world of orthodox Judaism to woo his new love interest, he is using his boyish charm to hang out on the fringes of the rough gay sex trade to find the villain (of course). This book certainly has everything for traders, and options traders might feel particularly vindicated in being portrayed as the supermen of the trading world. (Monte Carlo formula anyone?)
Having known Kolman for years, I can appreciate that he’s taken his journalistic smarts into fiction writing and overall succeeded in crafting a good read. But somewhere along the line the stereotypes got a bit long in the tooth and the ending perhaps a bit too pat. (Does the Securities and Exchange Commission really put its stamp on their batteries?) Still, as a quick fun read, it’s a keeper.
Ginger Szala is the publisher and editorial director of Futures Magazine. Reach her at gszala@futuresmag.com.