No Bull: My Life In and Out of Markets (John Wiley & Sons), due out this month, is largely a traditional autobiography. Steinhardt writes at length about his working-class upbringing in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn as the son of divorced parents, his difficult relationship with his father, his retreat from money management in 1995 (in a chapter titled “The Worst Year of My Life”) and, despite his ongoing support of Jewish cultural projects, his rejection of Judaism for atheism.
“It’s really the story of my life,” Steinhardt says. “It’s about some of the judgments I’ve made, some of the incongruities of my life. I somehow never felt that being a money manager was the ultimate life’s objective.”
To be sure, Steinhardt devotes several chapters to the story of how he built the firm he co-founded in 1967 with $7 million under management into a $5 billion colossus by the 1990s. But, he cautions, “this is not a how-to book.” He’s too much of a pessimist for that: “I tend to focus on the negative. There’s a lot of stories about bad trades, bad decisions I made. That’s not going to make anybody any money.” Somehow the negativity sure worked for him.
