When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management [Kindle Edition] Author: Roger Lowenstein | Language: English | ISBN:
B000FC1KZC | Format: PDF, EPUB
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With a new Afterword addressing today’s financial crisis
A BUSINESS WEEK BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
In this business classic—now with a new Afterword in which the author draws parallels to the recent financial crisis—Roger Lowenstein captures the gripping roller-coaster ride of Long-Term Capital Management. Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein explains not just how the fund made and lost its money but also how the personalities of Long-Term’s partners, the arrogance of their mathematical certainties, and the culture of Wall Street itself contributed to both their rise and their fall.
When it was founded in 1993, Long-Term was hailed as the most impressive hedge fund in history. But after four years in which the firm dazzled Wall Street as a $100 billion moneymaking juggernaut, it suddenly suffered catastrophic losses that jeopardized not only the biggest banks on Wall Street but the stability of the financial system itself. The dramatic story of Long-Term’s fall is now a chilling harbinger of the crisis that would strike all of Wall Street, from Lehman Brothers to AIG, a decade later. In his new Afterword, Lowenstein shows that LTCM’s implosion should be seen not as a one-off drama but as a template for market meltdowns in an age of instability—and as a wake-up call that Wall Street and government alike tragically ignored.
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- File Size: 688 KB
- Print Length: 288 pages
- Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (January 18, 2001)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000FC1KZC
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,966 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #5
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Economics > Theory - #29
in Books > Business & Money > Economics > Theory - #30
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Finance
- #5
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Economics > Theory - #29
in Books > Business & Money > Economics > Theory - #30
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Finance
A somewhat didactic narrative history of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management. Nicholas Dunbar covers the same subject in his book "Inventing Money." Both books present a blizzard of details about who did what and when. Too much detail. The general reader would better served by a medium sized article. Nevertheless if you're a finance buff interested in the nitty-gritty then read both books. Dunbar has a physics background and his book is more technical, while Lowenstein comes from journalism and his narrative flows better.
LCTM began operating in 1994, set up by John Meriwether formally head of the bond-arbitrage group at Solomon Brothers. He put together a star-studded cast that included three (1997) Nobel prize winners in economics. Their basic strategy was something called convergence arbitrage. In essence this strategy says buy two bonds that you think will track one another. Go long on the cheap one and short on the other; you make money if the spread narrows. In theory you are protected from changing prices as long as the two vary in the same way. To make the big bucks LCTM was after they took a gigantic number of highly leveraged arbitrage positions all over the world. To get high leverage you borrow for the position, like buying a stock on margin. LCTM got really high leverage by avoiding something called the "haircut," which is an extra margin of collateral banks usually demand, but forgave LCTM. Why would banks they do such a thing? Because they were blinded by the glitter of the cast, and in some cases the banks themselves were investors in LCTM. By 1997 convergence arbitrage opportunities in bonds began to dry up, everyone was doing it. So LCTM applied their strategy to stocks.
A couple of years ago I read Nick Dunbar's account of the LTCM collapse "Inventing Money", and a friend recently lent me this book. They make an interesting comparison.
Dunbar - a physicist by trade - is more interested in the theoretical economics that went into the risk arbitrage fund in the first place and how this came unstuck. He gives a long description of the Black-Scholes model, what it says, and how it was used to pull off the risk "free" trades which made Long Term so much money for three or four years.
Lowenstein, by contrast, barely mentions either the Black-Scholes model (he barely touches on option pricing at all, as a matter of fact) or the Italian convergence trades which eventually blew the gaffe on the fund, but instead tells the human story, exposes the inevitable egos, and indulges in more than a little smuggery (this book is long on wisdom after the fact) in dissecting the naivety of the LTCM hedging and trading strategy and the people who ran it.
As long as he sticks to the egos and the posturing, When Genius Failed is a dandy read: the negotiations amongst the Wall Street top brass as the fund is going under rate with anything served up in Barbarians at the Gate, and as this is a large part of the book, it rips along quite nicely.
But the schadenfreude grates: One of the lessons of the whole fiasco was that the smart money is with the guy who can predict the future: any old mug can be a genius with hindsight. Lowenstein spends a lot of his time wisely pointing out what the traders should have done.
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