This is an account of the experiences of the author in investment banking, an industry that is partly glamour and mostly drudgery and an intensifier of some of the least admirable vices - greed, bombast and dishonesty.

IB has many segments but its core is the securing, and/or manipulation of large sums of money (or representations thereof). This is known as the sell side. The other side is asset management and trading - the buy side. The author worked on both sides sequentially, and so writes from a place of knowledge and experience. He also worked in the 80s when structured products and derivatives were becoming mainstream; the 90s when they wrecked prestigious firms in the West and entire regions elsewhere; and the 2000s when the chickens came home to roost and the subprime crisis led to the issues of 2008. While the book talks briefly about all these eras, it focuses mostly on structured finance and derivatives, which is both a strength and a weakness.

The strength is that his knowledge of structured finance means he could talk at some length about its evolution, its use, and misuse.

The weakness is that when one is reading about technical stuff, the incomprehensible descriptions and diagrams all eventually meld into the same eye glaze inducing block of text that is read multiple times without being understood. There was a time, about 10 years ago, when I understood the things (in theory). I could price options (which are not available in my country), design swaps (which are only useful for really big and rich companies who preferred to use foreign IBs), and could avidly discuss derivatives. It was a time when I read the self-congratulatory hagiographies of the top banks and knew who their CEOs were. Being that money is a global deity, IBs are among its temples and their CEOs are high priests. Now, I just can't be bothered. Another weakness is that IB is much more than structured finance, and even though the book did not make such a claim, its dim view of that segment of the industry could tar the rest of it.

The book is written in a cynical tone, which is understandable for anyone who has worked in the industry regardless of whether the person was a success or not. It doesn't seem the author was a star. Objectively, that's not much of a failing. Except that, despicable as investment bankers often are, the high esteem in which the industry is held and the high entry requirements can make it seem that success in it makes the person equal to the best in a society. The cynical tone presents many structured products (the work of the core investment bankers - the sell siders) as little more than elaborate scams designed to fleece clients, I thought that was an extreme view, despite structured products being the cause of 2008 financial crisis and many previous ones as well as massive losses. However, it's like the saying - guns don't kill people, someone has to use the gun to do so. Thus with structured products, their use or misuse (based on slick marketing by the banker) cause losses, but on their own, they are just tools. The book also presented the trading activities (the buy side focus), especially if done for the firm's own account, known as proprietary trading; as little more than gambling. I agree with that view. I once attended a training program on pricing and trading derivatives when it seemed like the regulators would allow their introduction. The trainer was a trader from the Intercontinental Exchange (better known by its cool acronym - ICE) who kept talking about placing a bet on global shipping rates even though the bettor had neither ships nor goods to ship. I piped up and said this is gambling, he tried hard to prove that it wasn't; I think his explanations brought a few people to my view.

I think the title of the book was misleading. While it talked at length about traders and money, there was precious little about guns in it other than a few references to Donald Rumsfeld whose closest connection to guns was being US Secretary of Defense (or maybe his being American and republican, and thus probably a gun nut), and to some nameless traders who allegedly had combat experience. Alternatively, since investment bankers have a high opinion of themselves, they might think their MS Excel models and PowerPoint presentations are guns.

This book is not recommended because while interesting in some parts, it had too much information which was too technical to be interesting. It was also too cynical. The only people that might want to read it are younger versions of me, because they would find the cynicism amusing and talking about the technical stuff among peers might create the impression that one is smart.