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The Futures: The Rise of the Speculator and the Origins of the World's Biggest Markets
In The Futures, Emily Lambert, senior writer at Forbes magazine, tells us the rich and dramatic history of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade, which together comprised the original, most bustling futures market in the world. She details the emergence of the futures business as a kind of meeting place for gamblers and farmers and its subsequent trans...more
Hardcover, 240 pages
Published
December 28th 2010
by Basic Books
(first published November 5th 2010)
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Much like The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market, but with more hyperbole along the lines of Mezerich's Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai, Lambert just reviews a bit of the futures market for people that don't know why we have a futures market.
I added an extra star (two - would have been one) because if I look back at the title/subtitle, it should be obvious that I didn't need to read this one...
Oddly enough...more
I added an extra star (two - would have been one) because if I look back at the title/subtitle, it should be obvious that I didn't need to read this one...
Oddly enough...more
The Futures, written by Emily Lambert, a senior writer at Forbes magazine.
The Futures is a good book, especially if it is your first book into the history of the Chicago Exchanges. Emily Lambert does a good job at laying out some basic history of the exchanges and she organizes the chapters by commodity which is convenient. She makes the subject matter interesting by going through the list of the usual suspects, to her credit she also comes up with some people we don’t hear from much anymore li...more
The Futures is a good book, especially if it is your first book into the history of the Chicago Exchanges. Emily Lambert does a good job at laying out some basic history of the exchanges and she organizes the chapters by commodity which is convenient. She makes the subject matter interesting by going through the list of the usual suspects, to her credit she also comes up with some people we don’t hear from much anymore li...more
The Futures is an informal history of futures markets, mainly focusing on the now merged exchanges in Chicago, the Mercantile and Board of Trade. Futures markets involve buying and selling contracts for the future delivery of either a tangible (wheat, corn, soybeans, hog bellies (the raw material for bacon), and so forth) or intagible products, such as bonds. Most traders have no intention of taking delivery of the product and are trying to buy low and sell high. Futures contracts came into b
...more
As someone who lived in Chicago and worked in the industry (as an accountant) I found this book extremely interesting if somewhat confusing at times. For example, when the author mentioned "spoos" I remembered that it had been in the book previously. However, the index did not include the term so I could not go back and review what the term means (something to do with the S&P Index, I think.) There were many times that I wanted more facts and less color commentary. The book removed some of t...more
So... I guess I know a little bit more about futures markets than I did before I started reading this book. But not as much as I should, given that I just read a whole book about them. This book is long on minutiae about the history of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade and short on explanations of how futures markets exactly work.
The whole concept of futures is completely ludicrous to me anyway and reading a book that glorifies the history of men who have fueled the fires of ruthless profiteering in these brutal unregulated markets is really frustrating. The book is not all that well written either or I may have bumped this rating up to 3 stars.
There was a comment made by someone that I "liked". It says it all.
good historical chronology of the derivatives industry
Admittedly, this a huge, sprawling topic. But Lambert gets little credit for illuminating much or any of it. Her many reports on this topic in Forbes magazine shed more light than this book.
In short, there's little content in these pages. Her narrative would have been much better if she had narrowed her focus & deepened her analysis.
In short, there's little content in these pages. Her narrative would have been much better if she had narrowed her focus & deepened her analysis.
Not what I was looking for. There's nothing technical in here. Instead, it's an occasionally stimulating history of various futures markets (focusing on Chicago and traders) but since that's not what I wanted, I kind of wish I would've read that history of the A & P.
More of a love/lust letter of the author toward the gruff romantic image of a trader than a book about anything financial. Meh. In a different time, this may have captured the public's interest.
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