Throughout our half-decade, we've avoided the theory of trading and focused on real-live trading situations. A host of traders and salespeople have spilled the beans on how the business really works. Here are some tidbits. "Confessions of a Structured Note Salesman" "A lot of investors were getting snowed. Some product was misrepresented and people didn't know what they were buying. What was a short-term cash fund of a municipality doing buying a leveraged inverse floater?" "Eating Volatility for Breakfast: A Day in the Life of Internet Option Specialist Michael Riley" "We had requests for Flex customized options before we even started trading the standardized options on Priceline. That should have been the tip-off that insiders were selling." "The World According to Stan Jonas" "Hedge funds were terrifically leveraged. Guys like Moore Capital perhaps had $3 to $4 billion of hot money, at times leveraged 100 to 1. Michael Steinhardt had so many Canadian bonds that we thought he was going to have to file a 15D. 1994 was the first year in history when all global bond markets moved in the same direction and I don't think that's coincidental. When it came time to liquidate, it was just impossible. " "The World According to Lewis Borsellino" "The FX Option Trade" "Upstairs trading is just as emotional as downstairs, except there's no yelling and screaming. You go through the same gut-wrenching process when the market's against you. The thing I had to get used to was a lot more waiting." Plus "The World According to Larry McMillan" "The World According to Marty O'Connell" "Confessions of a Corporate Forex Trader"