When Genius Failed

Roger Lowenstein (born in 1954) is an American financial journalist and writer. He graduated from Cornell University and reported for the Wall Street Journal for more than a decade, including two years writing its Heard on the Street column, 1989 to 1991. Born in 1954, he is the son of Helen and Louis Lowenstein of Larchmont, N.Y. Lowenstein is married to Judith Slovin.He is also a director of Sequoia Fund. His father, the late Louis Lowenstein, was an attorney and Columbia University law professor who wrote books and articles critical of the American financial industry.Roger Lowenstein's latest book, America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve (The Penguin Press) was released on October 20, 2015.He has three children and lives in Westfield, New Jersey.

出版者:Random House Inc.

作者:Roger Lowenstein

页数:288

出版时间:2001-10-9

价格:16.00美元

装帧:平装

isbn号码:9780375758256

图书标签:金融Finance华尔街LTCM对冲基金投资美国案例

On September 23, 1998, the boardroom of the New York Fed was a tense place. Around the table sat the heads of every major Wall Street bank, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, and representatives from numerous European banks, each of whom had been summoned to discuss a highly unusual prospect: rescuing what had, until then, been the envy of them all, the extraordinarily successful bond-trading firm of Long-Term Capital Management. Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed is the gripping story of the Fed's unprecedented move, the incredible heights reached by LTCM, and the firm's eventual dramatic demise.

Lowenstein, a financial journalist and author of Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, examines the personalities, academic experts, and professional relationships at LTCM and uncovers the layers of numbers behind its roller-coaster ride with the precision of a skilled surgeon. The fund's enigmatic founder, John Meriwether, spent almost 20 years at Salomon Brothers, where he formed its renowned Arbitrage Group by hiring academia's top financial economists. Though Meriwether left Salomon under a cloud of the SEC's wrath, he leapt into his next venture with ease and enticed most of his former Salomon hires--and eventually even David Mullins, the former vice chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve--to join him in starting a hedge fund that would beat all hedge funds.

LTCM began trading in 1994, after completing a road show that, despite the Ph.D.-touting partners' lack of social skills and their disdainful condescension of potential investors who couldn't rise to their intellectual level, netted a whopping $1.25 billion. The fund would seek to earn a tiny spread on thousands of trades, "as if it were vacuuming nickels that others couldn't see," in the words of one of its Nobel laureate partners, Myron Scholes. And nickels it found. In its first two years, LTCM earned $1.6 billion, profits that exceeded 40 percent even after the partners' hefty cuts. By the spring of 1996, it was holding $140 billion in assets. But the end was soon in sight, and Lowenstein's detailed account of each successively worse month of 1998, culminating in a disastrous August and the partners' subsequent panicked moves, is riveting.

The arbitrageur's world is a complicated one, and it might have served Lowenstein well to slow down and explain in greater detail the complex terms of the more exotic species of investment flora that cram the book's pages. However, much of the intrigue of the Long-Term story lies in its dizzying pace (not to mention the dizzying amounts of money won and lost in the fund's short lifespan). Lowenstein's smooth, conversational but equally urgent tone carries it along well. The book is a compelling read for those who've always wondered what lay behind the Fed's controversial involvement with the LTCM hedge-fund debacle. --S. Ketchum

读后感

洛恩斯坦的《赌金者》（When Genius Failed）。他们的想法是通过金融工程技术算出各种衍生产品的价值，然后根据对这些衍生产品未来价格的趋势作出相应的操作以获取差价。长期资本管理公司的“特点”在于他们利用非常高的财务杠杆比率融到高于本金几十倍的资金，然后把...

读《赌金者》一书，竟耗去了一个半月。为里面的几个关键点环节深深感慨。读一个真实的具体的案例，远胜于读十本理论书。又感到作者罗格•洛温斯坦那孜孜不倦的钻研精神，打破沙煲纹到底的锲而不舍的精神，书里本着务求真实的精神，不妄加作者的主观臆想，而能把故事如同历史...  

金融/投资必读。很多老生常谈的道理，读LTCM rise and fall的真实故事更有真切感受。三个让我回味的教训： 1) Markets can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent. 即便你能正确判断市场出错并采取行动，市场回归正确的时间可能抹平你的收益、回归正确的起伏过程...  

索罗斯曾经说过，凡是人类构建的东西，都有着天然的巨大缺陷。尤其是金融市场，最易出现崩溃。这次美国次贷危机，给他的这一认识提供了最新的佐证，华尔街的最大清算银行贝尔斯登在两周内沦陷，当年每股数百美元的股价今天只能以2美元卖给了摩根，因为摩根认为他的净资产值...  

金融/投资必读。很多老生常谈的道理，读LTCM rise and fall的真实故事更有真切感受。三个让我回味的教训： 1) Markets can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent. 即便你能正确判断市场出错并采取行动，市场回归正确的时间可能抹平你的收益、回归正确的起伏过程...  

用户评价

Nothing genius about the story

记不住英文人名。。。。。啊啊啊啊啊啊~~~~对技术性的东西描述的太少了

readable and insightful history of LTCM

An epic account of how the legendary LTCM, an investment Dream Team led by a hero of the Liar's Poker, quickly rose to stardom with its computerised and mathematics-based investment models, only to find itself lose it all in five weeks amid irrational market conditions, due to lax governance, excessive leverage and inherent flaws of the models.

其实挺多细节没有读懂的(汗颜...),不过关于LTCM的失败，有一点还是很有警醒作用的，即像对冲基金这种看似高端的金融产物，如果脱离了对社会各方面的了解，失败就成为了必然。Meriwether召集的精英们，从前美联储副主席到诺贝尔获奖者，可以说是一支让人叹为观止的强大队伍，可是他们败就败在目中无人。如果他们从数学公式里走出来，多了解基层的状况，也许他们就不会从98年俄罗斯违约这一事件开始一败涂地。