Meriwether embarked on a hiring spree to take in several people from the academic world and formed The Arbitrage Group at the firm. Quants, as these people were known as, wasn’t a glorious word back then. Banks hired extremely smart academicians and mathematicians during the 1980s, mostly for research purposes, as they were deemed unfit for trading. The edge Meriwether found at Salomon Brothers was the untapped brain power of the academic world. He was smart and understood that one needs an edge to stand out in the market. He wasn’t crude and loud, but a reserved and intensely private person. He grew up in a Catholic community in Chicago and was accustomed to a “pervasive sense of order”.

He was “the priest of calculated gamble”, not a reckless poker player.

Lowenstein starts his book by casting a different light on Meriwether. How did Meriwether respond? He upped the stake to US$10 million and Gutfreund backed off. Hence, the famous quote of the book: “One hand, one million dollars, no tears.” “King of Wall Street” John Gutfreund, then CEO of Salomon Brothers Inc, had walked up to his trading desk for a US$1 million poker game. If you have read Liar’s Poker by famous financial journalist and writer Michael Lewis, you would know that Meriwether is a poker player with an enormous risk appetite. However, at the heart of the story is John Meriwether, the founder of LTCM who was known as one of the finest bond traders at that time. The fund was Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), and the two Nobel laureates - Myron Scholes and Robert Merton - are the ones who developed the Black-Scholes model widely used to value options contracts today. Ity, to see how a bunch of geniuses, with the help of two Nobel Prize winners, ran a hedge fund so wildly successfully in the 1990s, until it wasn’t. Urn:oclc:874120289 Republisher_date 20120323185916 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120322030701 Scanner by an American journalist Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed arrived at my doorstep last August during the lockdown period. O元268118W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 88.18 Pages 298 Ppi 514 Related-external-id urn:isbn:1841155047 Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 18:35:03 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA174001 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Edition 1.

When genius failed book