This book traces the rise, fall, and rescue of Long-Term Capital Management, perhaps the most celebrated (and infamous) hedge fund in history. It is a remarkable account of how a lot of really smart people—from the fund’s partners to its bankers to the regulators charged with protecting the public’s interest—did some things that, with the luxury of hindsight, proved to be very foolish.

It is a story with few heroes, but one with many lessons to be learned. However, beyond merely offering a cautionary tale of how greed, hubris and myopia almost brought down the entire financial system, Lowenstein also provides the reader with an excellent description of the myriad investment strategies that continue to be employed by the hedge fund industry today. At the very least, this is a book that will challenge what you think you know about leverage, liquidity and diversification. ( )

Just about as good as Michael Lewis, but less on the instant laughs and more on the long setup. I am now going to read everything Roger Lowenstein has ever written.

I included this book in my book: The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. www.100bestbiz.com. ( )

Excellent ...and frightening. Have we learned nothing? The '07-'08 "sub-prime" rose from the same thinking and behavior. Very well written. ( )

A couple of years ago I read Nick Dunbar's account of the LTCM collapse "Inventing Money", and a friend recently lent me this book. They make an interesting comparison.
Dunbar - a physicist by trade - is more interested in the theoretical economics that went into the risk arbitrage fund in the first place and how this came unstuck. He gives a long description of the Black-Scholes model, what it says, and how it was used to pull off the risk "free" trades which made Long Term so much money for three or four years.

Lowenstein, by contrast, barely mentions either the Black-Scholes model (he barely touches on option pricing at all, as a matter of fact) or the Italian convergence trades which eventually blew the gaffe on the fund, but instead tells the human story, exposes the inevitable egos, and indulges in more than a little smuggery (this book is long on wisdom after the fact) in dissecting the naivety of the LTCM hedging and trading strategy and the people who ran it.

As long as he sticks to the egos and the posturing, When Genius Failed is a dandy read: the negotiations amongst the Wall Street top brass as the fund is going under rate with anything served up in Barbarians at the Gate, and as this is a large part of the book, it rips along quite nicely.

But the schadenfreude grates: One of the lessons of the whole fiasco was that the smart money is with the guy who can predict the future: any old mug can be a genius with hindsight. Lowenstein spends a lot of his time wisely pointing out what the traders should have done.

Additionally, Lowenstein employs some metaphors which indicate he might not have much of a grip on his subject: for one, he states "a bit of liquidity greases the wheels of markets; what Greenspan overlooked is that with too much liquidity, the market is apt to skid off the tracks." It's a poor metaphor, because it isn't excess liquidity which causes markets to skid, rather, it's the sudden disappearance of it. As this is the fundamental lesson of the Long Term story, it's a bad mistake to make for the sake of a smart-alec aphorism.

Similarly, in the epilogue states, with regard to the putative diversification in the fund "the Long-Term episode proved that eggs in separate baskets *can* break simultaneously". Again, this conclusion is not supported by the text, which observes several times that in a market crash, liquidity drains and the correlation risk of instruments in the market goes to one: that is to say, it turns out all your eggs are in the same basket after all. Diversity wasn't the problem; the problem was you wrongly thought you had it.

For these reasons I prefer Dunbar's more academic work: it may not be such a sizzling read, but nor does it misguidedly kick a fund when it's down. ( )