The Greatest Trade Ever: How One Man Bet Against the Markets and Made $20 Billion

(Paperback)

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The thrilling story of the trader who predicted the crash - and made the biggest windfall in history Autumn 2008. The world's finances collapse but one man makes a killing. John Paulson, a softly spoken hedge-fund manager who still took the bus to work, seemed unlikely to stake his career on one big gamble. But he did - and The Greatest Trade Ever is the story of how he realised that the sub-prime housing bubble was going to burst, making $15 billion for his fund and more than $4 billion for himself in a single year. It's a tale of folly and wizardry, individual brilliance versus institutional stupidity. John Paulson made the biggest winning bet in history. And this is how he did it.

Reviews

Simply terrific. Easily the best of the post-crash financial books -- Malcolm Gladwell
Greg Zuckerman was the first to tell the world about John Paulson's sensational trade . . . He's written the definitive account of a strange and wonderful subplot of the financial crisis * Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker *
A must-read for anyone fascinated by financial madness * Mail on Sunday *
A forensic, read-in-one-sitting book * Sunday Times *
Extraordinary, excellent * Observer *
Compelling * Economist *
Zuckerman takes us to Wall Street's heart of darkness, where mushroomed a $1 trillion subprime mortgage market that only the few, the brave, the smart dared short. This is at once a great page-turner and a great illuminator of the market's crash. * John Heylar, co-author of Barbarians at the Gate *
Much, much more than a brilliant account of Paulson's trade of the century; this book also provides a highly enjoyable and lucid journey through the analytical and emotional maze that constituted the financial markets on the eve of the Great Recession. Compulsory reading. * Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of Pacific Investment Management Co and author of When Markets Collide *
A magnificent insider look at how Paulson and others profited off of subprime's demise... insightful and gripping. * Marketfolly.com *

Author Bio

Gregory Zuckerman is a special writer at the Wall Street Journal. He writes about business subjects like financial trades, hedge funds and private-equity firms, and about innovation and cutting-edge science. He's a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award, the highest honour in business journalism. Zuckerman is the author of The Greatest Trade Ever and The Frackers, and he appears regularly on CNBC, Fox Business, and the BBC. He lives in New York.