#3 - The Greatest Trade Ever

The Greatest Trade Ever by Wall Street Journal’s Gregory Zuckerman was the perfect follow up on Too Big to Fail that I enjoyed reading in a palapa in Mexico in December last year. It’s a much faster read that ties well into Too Big to Fail. The book chronicles John Paulson and a few other maverick trader’s sub-prime mortgage trades that made them millions and in Paulson’s case billions - $15BN to be exact.

I love the fact that the book quotes Andrew Lahde’s farewell letter to his investors. It’s absolutely and utterly brilliant in it’s prose, expression and message.

I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

And who said reading is harmless?