Barbarians at the Gate, The Fall of RJR Nabisco, by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar ( Read more... )

More Money Than God, by Sebastian Mallaby ( Read more... )

The Big Short, by Michael Lewis ( Read more... )

Priceless, by William Poundstone ( Read more... )

I'm somewhat bemused by the various discussions of high-frequency trading. It's in the news a bit more following the 16-minute panic, but there have been discussions of why it might be fair or unfair for a while ( Read more... )

Looking at the price graph for Thursday's stock market crash, I was struck by how very close to exponential the curve looked. That suggests to me that the effect is a feedback loop, and not the result of an extra-large trade or other error ( Read more... )

There appear to be two kinds of traders: Those that don't believe mathematical models enough, and those that believe them too much.

Trading on gut instinct can get you into trouble, but trading based on a bad model can get you into even more trouble.

I'm not quite sure what to make of the SEC's suit: Goldman apparently put together a deal between John Paulson and ACA, and the core of the complaint is that ACA wasn't given enough warning that Goldman thought that ACA was getting a bad deal.

The puzzling part is that the deal was a synthetic CDO, which (unless I'm missing something important) ( Read more... )

Too Big To Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin ( Read more... )

Getting useful from an investment adviser is tricky, for two primary reasons ( Read more... )