Ugly Americans
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4.4 • 10 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
The true story of the Ivy League hedge fund cowboys who gambled with the dangerously high stakes of the Asian stock market.
John Malcolm, high school football hero and Princeton graduate made his millions back in the early '90s, a time when dozens of elite young American graduates made their fortunes in hedge funds in the Far East, beating the Japanese at their own game, riding the crashing waves of the Asian stock markets, gambling at impossibly high stakes and winning. Failure meant not only bankruptcy and disgrace à la Nick Leeson, but potentially even death - at the hands of the Japanese Yakuza: one of the world's most notoriously violent organised crime syndicates.
Ugly Americans tells Malcolm's story, and that of others like him, in a high octane book, filled with glamour, money and the dangers these incur, this true story is a cross between Mezrich's own best-selling Bringing Down the House and Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though the names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent, this is a true story, containing all the ingredients of a great narrative a main character the reader can relate to, an appealing love interest, money, danger, the need for acceptance, suspense and even the realization (in some form) of the American dream. Mezrich (Bringing Down the House) presents wanna-be financial star "John Malcolm," who accepts a nebulous job offer in Japan in the mid-1990s and leaves his middle-class New Jersey postcollege aimless existence for an adventure he might have dreamed of had he any idea of what the big boys' world of finance was really like. After hitting the ground at top speed from day one, John and his cohorts all male, mostly Ivy League graduates learn their way around the lucrative, fast-paced and legal-but-barely-palatable world of cowboy-style Asian market finance. In the process, they make millions (sometimes per trade) and pride themselves on knowing when to get in and how to spot their exit point. Their bottom line is all that matters; everything else from emotion to opinion is secondary. In a truly engaging look at how an innocent who thinks he knows the world does actually end up understanding a small but significant piece of it, Mezrich manages to incorporate solid journalism into a narrative that just plain works.
Customer Reviews
Flying high
Absorbing page turner that Depicts the flamboyance and arrogance of the stock market traders where they make crazy money but are always outsiders in a country where the yakuza rule.