More Money Than God

The year before John Paulson decided, in the spring of 2009, to give investors in his hedge funds the option of having their returns measured and paid in gold, he had made a fortune for himself and his clients by betting on the value of America's housing markets and banks. Now he was betting that an even more basic product than housing — money itse

The 2008 financial crisis wasn’t exactly responsible for what was going on, but it had played a role. Investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley that had once taken the most interesting trading risks had become clunkier and more heavily regulated. They were being shoved into the boring Wall Street role once played by the big commercial

In today’s stock market, most trades are made with someone else’s money (in Druckenmiller’s case, mostly George Soros’s). The 1990s and 2000s are sometimes thought of as the age of the day trader. But holdings by institutional investors like mutual funds, hedge funds, and pensions have increased at a much faster rate (figure 11-9). When Fama drafte

In August alone, the fund lost roughly 45 percent of its capital, an event that the fund’s risk analysis predicted should happen no more than once in the history of Western civilization. It shouldn’t be unduly difficult to draw a conclusion about whether LTCM was extremely unlucky, or whether its managers misunderstood the nature of the risk.