Insider uncovers the seamier side of the Street

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst
A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market
by Dan Reingold with Jennifer Reingold
HarperCollins, 368 pages, $25.95

Credit Suisse First Boston made a $1.5 million mistake in Dan Reingold's favor when the highly regarded stock market analyst moved from Merrill Lynch to CSFB in 1999. Reingold could have pocketed the money without any accounting for it. Therefore, he was astonished when no one complimented him on doing the honest thing instead.

''The contract was ready for signing. All I had to do was put pen to paper and I'd have a nifty $1.5 million bonus that I hadn't even expected, in addition to having doubled my pay. It was truly surreal." writes Reingold in ''Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst," a fascinating look inside the wheeling-and-dealing world of high finance.

Reingold left an e-mail for Brady Dougan, then global head of Credit Suisse First Boston's securities division, pointing out the mistake. A few days later he received a new contract minus the $1.5 million. But there was no comment about his display of honesty.

''On Wall Street honesty doesn't raise an eyebrow, even when it involves over a million dollars. I guess it would surprise no one that dishonesty goes unnoticed as well. There really is no right and wrong on Wall Street, I thought to myself. Just money," Reingold writes.

''Confessions" is mostly about that dishonesty on Wall Street, particularly in the telecom sector, which was Reingold's specialty, during the rip-roaring '90s before the bursting of the dot-com and telecom bubbles.

It is about the blight of insider trading that puts smaller individual investors at such a vast disadvantage and the conflicts of interest that result when analysts hype the stock of some companies to bring in business for the investment banks that employ them.

''Confessions" focuses intensively on Jack Grubman, erstwhile analyst for Salomon Smith Barney, the most influential analyst of the '90s. Grubman, for most of that decade, ranked number one on the Institutional Investors list of top analysts. Reingold was number two during much of that decade.

Although a little bit of envy may figure into Reingold's evident disdain for his strongest rival, the author presents several instances where Grubman appeared to have rated stocks higher than they deserved to be in order to win favor with those companies and bring millions of dollars to Salomon Smith Barney.

He also accuses Grubman of unethically and perhaps illegally revealing ''over the wall" information to boost certain stocks. The term refers to information dispensed during background sessions about impending deals that is not to be made public ahead of time.

Analysts supposedly are prohibited from writing about such deals in their research reports and forecasts if they are among those brought over the wall and their investment banks stand to gain from the advance information.

Many of the books that purport to be insiders' revelations of the way Wall Street really works fail to fulfill the expectations they raise. Reingold's memoir is not one of those.

In this case the author exceeds the promise of the book's subtitle. Reingold delivers a well-documented, in-depth look at the Street that names heroes and villains and pulls no punches.