Interview with Anthony Scaramucci, Author of "Goodbye Gordon Gekko"

Sometime in the late 1980s there was a young man from the outer boroughs. His father was a laborer and worked for the company for his entire career, and he had a mentor and folks who helped him along the way. He’d almost gone in another direction career-wise, but was ultimately drawn to the excitement of Wall Street. He took a job at one of the largest and most successful firms on Wall Street hoping to “bag the elephant.”

You know the story, but...

...the firm wasn’t Jackson Steinem, it was Goldman Sachs. The company where he cut his teeth was not Bluestar Airlines, it was Ghost Motorcycles. The solid advice wasn’t from Lou Mannheim, it was from Sol Gittleman. And the young man wasn’t Bud Fox, he was and still is Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital. To set the record straight, Scaramucci doesn’t think greed serves anyone, and he’s so disgusted with it and what’s happening on Wall Street that he’s written a book called Goodbye Gordon Gekko: How to Find Your Fortune Without Losing Your Soul. “We need to be done with Gekko,” he said. “It’s been 25 years since we’ve met this guy and it’s time to put Gekko behind us.”

–Michael Martin has been a successful trader for 20 years. He’s been teaching for the last 11 of those years, mostly through UCLA Extension and the CFA Institute. This article originally appeared on Martin's blog, MartinKronicle.