The Greatest Trades of All Time: Top Traders Making Big Profits from the Crash of 1929 to Today

Introduction

In the past 100 years, financial innovation has quite possibly reached the apex of its evolution. Debt instruments, investment services, and changes to market structure have changed, for better or for worse, and we the people have changed with them.

There is a certain breed of man that is unmatched in terms of genius and business acumen. These “demigods” of the financial world have played such an important role in economic development in modern times that their absence would dramatically alter the life-changing events such as the financial crisis of 2008-2009.

Within every market lies opportunity. Whether you are long or short does not matter, but how you play the game does. People like John Paulson and Kyle Bass identified profitable opportunities when they were but a brief idea in the heads of their counterparts at major banks and other institutions.

Through discovering these various opportunities, these men and these men alone executed what I consider the greatest trades of all time. It must be noted that I am not being sexist by any means. The fact is that no woman and very few men have achieved what the people in this book have.

One must not forget that the game is played in a multitude of forms, whether it is fixed-income markets, derivatives, equities, or some other financial instrument. They are all interconnected. Economies of the world are interconnected as well and thus trying to remove worries like systemic risk from our world will be impossible during ...