Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson gives readers an inside look at how billion-dollar traders on Wall Street turn a crisis into financial gains.
Key Details
- As a Wall Street veteran, Patterson knows how deals go down on Wall Street and how a crisis can mean financial gains for the world’s elite.
- With more global events like cyber attacks, pandemics, and economic unrest, more chaos threatens assets than ever before.
- Yet, in the face of these troubles, two groups of traders have emerged—those who think people can never be prepared for a disaster and those who think every market disruption can be predicted.
Why it’s important
Chaos seems to be the new normal in economic and political news. The markets have been reactive toward unexpected events, but some groups question whether or not this is the best stance.
In Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions In the New Age of Crisis, Patterson gives readers a closer look at the two schools of thought concerning market disruptions.
The first, a group led by The Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, believes that disasters are unavoidable and cannot be predicted. In their view, extreme events will always surprise the populace and are inevitable. But even unpredictability has a market value.
Taleb’s collaborator Mark Spitznagel started the Universa hedge fund, a firm that protects billionaires against unpredictable market disruptions.
The next group relies on data and formulas to predict coming disasters. Patterson lists French mathematician Didier Sornette as the leader of this philosophy. Sornette argues these market disruptions can be anticipated and even predicted with the right mathematical formula, and even better, they can be prevented.
In Chaos Kings, Patterson evaluates these philosophies and guides the readers along a journey of discovering which path will secure a successful financial future.
Chaos Kings was published by Scribner on June 6, 2023.