Global Lecture Tour
Mr. McDonald is on the lecture tour, recently speaking at Universities, Banks, Investment Firms, Law Firms and Insurance companies. His speaking engagements have been all over the United States, Europe and Asia. He has been a Keynote Speaker at over 40 venues since his book was published.
"A Colossal Failure of Common Sense - the Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers," was published by Random House 7/21/09, and hit the New York Times bestseller list in its first week. It is now one of the bestselling business books in the world, translated into 12 different languages. Mr. McDonald is President of the McDonald Advisory Group based in New York City.
Mr. McDonald has been a guest and or contributor on CNBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, Fortune, CNN, CCTV China, France 24, BBC World, BBC America, Barron's, Channel 4 News London, Bloomberg TV, Fox TV, Fox Radio, CBS, PBS Frontline and NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CBC News Canada, Business Week, The Economist, Die Zeit Germany, Tokyo TV, the Financial Times, Time Magazine, NPR, and the New York Post.
At Lehman Brothers
From July 2004 through September 2008, Mr. McDonald was a Vice President of Distressed Debt and Convertible Securities Trading at Lehman Brothers. He ran an extremely successful joint venture between the firm's fixed income and equity divisions. He was the most profitable trader on the convertible securities department 2006 and 2007.
The Subprime Implosion
In early 2006, Mr. McDonald was part of a faction that called the subprime crisis, then he made over $46 million for the firm during its implosion. Mr. McDonald was highly regarded as one of the most consistently profitable traders at Lehman with over $83 million in trading profits during his time with the firm.
More interestingly, Mr. McDonald was an integral part of a faction within Lehman Brothers that passionately tried in vain to stop the firm from heading down the road to destruction. Likewise, he also worked closely with Lehman's credit derivatives team and saw first-hand the design and construction of what Warren Buffett termed as "Wall Street's financial weapons of mass destruction."
Before Lehman Brothers
Mr. McDonald was Co-Founder of Convertbond.com, a website coined by Forbes Magazine as "Best of the Web" from 2000-2003, and was noted as the world wide web's premier source for convertible securities information, valuation and news.
In October 1999, before the dot-com crash, the site was successfully sold to Morgan Stanley and remains the property of the firm.
Mr. McDonald also spent over five years as a successful retail financial adviser, helping individual investors build wealth, starting with Merrill Lynch in 1990 and working with firms like CitiGroup's Smith Barney Division.
