Lawrence McDonald
Former Vice President, Lehman Brothers

Author: ‘The Colossal Failure of Common Sense- the Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman’

At Lehman Brothers
From July 2004 through September 2008, Lawrence G. 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 desk 2006 and 2007.
The Subprime Implosion
In early 2006, Lawrence 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, Lawrence 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
Lawrence G. McDonald is also Co-Founder of Convertbond.com, a website coined by Forbes Magazine as “Best of the Web” from 2000-2003, and was noted there 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 advisor, helping individual investors build wealth, starting with Merrill Lynch in 1990 and working with firms like CitiGroup’s Smith Barney Division. Currenly, Lawrence is the Managing Director at Pangea Capital Management LP.