The Greatest Trade Ever

What Hacker News says

1. dogman144Mar 2020
   Random Walk and Black Swan are two good reads. Even if you end up not agreeing with the two's takes, they'll make you sufficiently skeptical of how well a book claims to explain the industry, which is a good position to approach it from.

   My bias will show, but the industry routinely blows itself on sometimes small or sometimes very large scales, sometimes or often through devices of its own creation. It's important to know that the system is entirely capable of doing this to itself, and therefore the system, and those in it, may not be able to explain itself well.

   Edit: another thing worth reading is Too Big to Fail, The Big Short, and Greatest Trade Ever. All are engaging books, and really walk through how 2008 started and ended through different perspectives of the system. TBtF will cover the Fed and Tier 1. BS/GTE cover the sell side. And then when you pair GTE with what happened to it's focus, John Paulson, after 2008, in that he didn't really have a repeat 'win,' it's a good anecdote for what I said above.

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2. nrao123Jan 2016
   I am a big fan of Lewis & I have read multiple accounts / variations of the sub-prime crisis. The Big Short tells only half the story but nevertheless a very important one especially by covering Michael Burry as patient zero for identifying the problem. However, the book does a big dis-service by not writing more extensively about John Paulson. He made the most amount ($15BN) shorting sub-prime mortgages & when you have a book called the Big Short but don't cover the biggest short, it seems incomplete. Gregory Zuckerman's "Greatest Trade Ever" should be read along with "Big Short" to get a more complete view of the crisis.
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3. omonraOct 2013
   Umm..ok. But the point of Black Swan is that certain are unpredictable. Yet plenty of people saw the crisis coming [2,3]. Taleb was not one of them - please see [0]

   If you are a Taleb fan (or just curious), check out this critique of his work:

   [0] http://quixoticfinance.com/tag/nassim-taleb/

   [1] http://unpleasantfacts.com/falken-on-taleb

   People who actually predicted the crisis

   [2] http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Trade-Ever-Behind-Scenes/dp/0...

   [3] http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Short-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393...

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4. teja1990Dec 2011
   Mine are :

   Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, I just love this book!

   Greatest Trade Ever by Gregory Zuckerman.

   And I read manga , so include One Piece as well :D

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5. byrneseyeviewAug 2010
   No, there were lots of people who don't explicitly predict crashes, who still called this one. Michael Lewis' The Big Short is a fun overview. The Greatest Trade Ever is also good; the protagonist of that one is a merger arb, not a doom-sayer. And of course, countless people sold when they found prices too high.

   It seems very obvious to me that the establishment has to buy into it for a bubble to exist. Prices peak when optimism peaks, so you'll necessarily be able to point to people in authority who were too optimistic. The only alternative to that is a) for prices to undershoot rhetoric (arbitrage opportunity!) or b) for prices to never go down (result: buying is a safe bet, causing a bubble, leading to a crash).

   What I am suggesting is simply that there is no bubble in education nor can there be. Whatever the number of people that are educated so the better it is.

   This is what we call a "Bubble mentality". No P/E too high; it's the Internet! No collateral too poor; it's the ownership society! You clearly don't believe that; you would not be happy if, e.g., we were starving because every farmer decided to finish his Masters in English lit. There is a right amount of education, and it is not an arbitrarily large amount. What I'm pointing out is that by every measurable quantity, we're paying more and more for something of less and less value.

   Education you see is very different to an eighteen year old than to someone who has gone through life so well perhaps and has the freedom to provide us his wisdom through the internet. That eighteen year old perhaps your have forgotten does not actually quite know yet who he is or the nature of reality. Higher education provides him a good grasp of that.

   Not sure what you're trying to say. I'm 23.

   Education is beneficial. That doesn't mean it's worth trading anything of value for any extra amount of it. It is precisely this kind of thinking that leads to other bubbles.

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6. dexterdogSep 2016
   That was illustrated quite well in Greatest Trade Ever / Big Short / [insert other books about housing meltdown here], but in that case it was more that the market stayed both irrational and criminally manipulated too long.
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