Amit Chatwani is the toast of Wall Street's junior set. He doesn't work for a bank.

From a studio apartment in Manhattan's East Village, the 23- year-old writes Leveraged Sell-Out, a Web log that chronicles the life of today's young financiers: the pastel Lacoste polo shirts, the "bottle service" at Meatpacking District clubs, the women pursuing men from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Blackstone Group LP during bonus season.

…[Chatwani‘s] eight-month-old site gets more than 30,000 page views in the four days after he posts an essay, he says. …

Leveraged Sell-Out, DealBreaker and a half-dozen more online diaries are gaining popularity among young bankers. The sites blend blogging, a regular habit for Wall Street's college-age summer interns and entry-level employees, with an older tradition of insider memoirs such as "Liar's Poker," Michael Lewis's tale of Salomon Brothers bond traders in the 1980s.

More than four thousand students and business school graduates are starting jobs at New York securities firms in the next few months, including about 1,800 at Goldman Sachs, 1,000 at Merrill Lynch & Co. and 400 at Credit Suisse Group.

They are entering "analyst" and "associate" programs that demand hundred-hour workweeks spent answering to senior bankers, preparing presentations known as pitch-books and sitting in cubicles doing computer modeling.

About Time

"It's about time there are blogs about it," says Johanna Tyburski, 29, who left Credit Suisse in March after six years in the Zurich-based company's telecommunications banking and high- yield departments in New York. "You know that your life is crazy and not real, and there's a humor that goes with it."

The on-line spoofs and gossip pages are typically written by outsiders with contributions from unnamed industry workers. Securities firms tend to fire employees who publicly break their silence about clients or internal politics.

"People layer their communications," says Douglas Rae, a professor at the Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut. "There are things they want to say to their peers that they can't afford to say to their superiors. That hidden transcript is everywhere."

Going Private, billed as "sardonic memoirs" of the private-equity world, told readers on May 22 that its anonymous lead writer received a note demanding money to keep from being named publicly. Among the site's other offerings: a May 3 celebration of Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli's 537th birthday. …

`Love and Banking'

BankersBall, started in October with the tagline "Where Bankers Come to Party," has sections including "the Natty Banker," with tips on Manhattan suit sales, and "Ask the Ex- Working Girl," with advice on "love and banking." It also offers shortcuts for using Microsoft Corp.'s Excel software, the junior banker's primary tool for financial models. …

While young bankers who blog may get in trouble, the sites aren't blocked from work stations at Goldman, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley or Credit Suisse, spokespeople at those New York firms say.

At Merrill, access is limited by a policy blocking any site with a chat room because "the company can't supervise, retain or archive the information," spokeswoman Selena Morris says.

Wall Street's new Web chatter also includes dozens of sites focused on serious analysis of markets and the economy.

It's all part of an explosion of blogging, where Internet users post opinions, unchecked news and links to other sites as often as a dozen times a day.

…DealBreaker, a two-month-old "online business tabloid" has been getting an average of 30,000 visitors daily, says publisher and lead writer Elizabeth Spiers. More than 80 percent of readers are men, and 68 percent work in financial services, she says. The median age is 29.

Spiers, 29, is the founding editor of Gawker, the most-read New York celebrity blog. On her new site, Spiers brings the same breathlessness to investment-banking personnel shifts as Gawker does to movie-star sightings on Madison Avenue.

A DealBreaker section called "Planespotting" on May 22 included an "unconfirmed" account that a Lear jet registered to Denise Rich, ex-wife of Marc Rich, the one-time fugitive financier pardoned by former President Bill Clinton, flew from New York's Westchester airport to Arkansas's Rogers Municipal Airport-Carter Field and back…'