In every class of asset and all over the world, the market moved against the hedge fund in Greenwich. Rickards, the house attorney, described it to colleagues as the “LTCM death trade.” The correlations had gone to one; every roll was turning up snake eyes. The mathematicians had not foreseen this. Random markets, they had thought, would lead to standard distributions—to a normal pattern of black sheep and white sheep, heads and tails, and jacks and deuces, not to staggering losses in every trade, day after day after day.
