Ray Kachel’s Journey from Seattle to Zuccotti Park

In the New Yorker, George Packer with a profile of a man who sold off what was left of his belongs and journeyed to New York to join the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Kachel had four hundred and fifty dollars from the sale of his copy of Final Cut Pro. For two hundred and fifty, you could travel to New York City on a Greyhound bus. He had never been farther east than Dallas, but New York City was so dense and diverse, and so full of ideas and ways to make money, that if he could learn to exist there

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Tagged george packer, new yorker, occupy wall street profile

Raj Rajaratnam – Getting An Edge

The New Yorker's George Packer on the insider trading case of Raj Rajaratnam, this is a great read.

In the language of hedge funds, Galleon’s strategy was to “arbitrage reality” with the consensus on the Street—to find information about a given company that diverged from Wall Street’s view, allowing Galleon to cash in when the company’s stock price rose or fell. At Galleon, this was known as “getting an edge.” The analyst or portfolio manager with the best read on a company was called the “axe” on that stock. The surest way to become the axe was to have a

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Tagged george packer, getting an edge, insider trading, raj rajaratnam, the new yorker