Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and unknowns in the dazzling world of derivatives Revised edition (Financial Times Series)
Traders Guns and Money is a wickedly comic expose of the culture, games and pure deceptions played out every day in trading rooms around the world. And played out with other people's money. A sensational insider's view of the business of trading and marketing derivatives, this revised edition explains the frighteningly central role that derivatives and financial products played in the global financial crisis. This worldwide bestseller reveals the truth about derivatives: those financial tools memorably described by Warren Buffett as 'financial weapons of mass destruction'. Traders, Guns and Money will introduce you to the players and the practices and reveals how the real money is made and lost. The global financial crisis took almost everyone by surprise and even now new problems keep appearing and solutions continue to be elusive. In the original version of Traders, Guns and Money, Satyajit Das provided a highly prescient insight into the structure and risk of the world financial system exposing the problems that are becoming readily apparent. In a 2006 speech The Coming Credit Crash Das argued that: "an informed analysis shows that risk is not better spread but more leveraged and (arguably) more concentrated . This does not improve the overall stability and security of the financial system but exposes it to increased risk of a "crash".
Traders: Risks, Decisions, and Management in Financial Markets
This is a book about traders in financial markets: what they do, the kind of people they are, how they perceive the world they inhabit, how they make decisions and take risks. This is also a book about how traders are managed--the best and the worst examples--and about the institutions they inhabit: firms, markets, cultures, and theories of how the world works. How these institutions function, how traders are managed, and how traders view the world, all have profound effects on the wider financial environment. This book explores these relationships and their implications theoretically and empirically.
The data discussed in this book draw on a three-year project researching the psychological and social influences on the behavior and performance of traders in investment banks. 118 traders and managers in four leading organizations participated. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews supplemented by questionnaires, measures of personality, risk propensity and a novel computer based measure designed to assess illusion of control and other cognitive biases.
The authors' approach to writing this book is explicitly interdisciplinary. They draw on sociology, psychology and economics in order to illuminate the work of traders and the world they inhabit.
The book is a significant contribution to the growing body of research and literature which suggests that if we are to effectively understand financial markets and the actors who inhabit them, the insights of neo-classical financial economics need supplementing with a broader range of social science approaches.
The book will be of value to researchers interested in the functioning of financial institutions and markets, to those with an interest in market regulation and to practitioners wishing to benefit from an analytical perspective on the challenges facing traders and their managers.
How do the world’s top traders make millions of dollars in the markets – sometimes in a matter of only weeks or even days? That’s precisely the question Jack Schwager was trying to answer when he interviewed 17 superstar money-makers including Richard Dennis, Paul Tudor Jones, Ed Seykota, Marty Schwartz, Tom Baldwin and others. After reading this best-selling book, you’ll know what ingredients enable these top traders to consistently work their financial magic in the markets while so many others walk away losers. One of the top-selling trading books of all-time!
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