Liar's Poker

by Michael Lewis

Alexander had a knack for interpreting events around him. The most impressive aspect of this was its speed. When news broke, he seemed to have already planned his response. He trusted his nose completely. If he had a flaw, it was that he lacked the ability to question his own immediate reactions. He saw the markets as a tightly woven web. Yank on one filament in the web, and the other filaments had to move too. He therefore traded in all markets: the bonds, currencies and stocks of France*, Germany, the United States, Japan, Canada, and Britain; the markets in oil, precious metals, and bulk commodities; all interested him. * One of Alexander’s financial heroics found its distorted way to the centre of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe describes his protagonist, Sherman McCoy, getting himself in trouble with the gold-backed French government bonds, the so-called Giscard bonds. It was Alexander who had first discovered the Giscard was mispriced, and far from getting himself in trouble, made many millions of dollars exploiting the mispricing.