The Hour Between Dog and Wolf
How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind
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4.0 • 32 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“Brilliant.” —David Brooks, The New York Times
“A profoundly unconventional book . . . So absorbing that I wound up reading it twice.” —Bloomberg
Finalist for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year
What happens to your body when you take risks? What happens to it when you make or lose a lot of money?
In this startling book, physiologist and former Wall Street trader John Coates vividly illustrates what happens to your body when you engage in risk taking. You transform into a different person, a change Coates refers to as "the hour between dog and wolf." He tells a gripping story of a group of traders caught in a bull market and then a crash. As the excitement builds he takes us inside the traders' bodies to see the biology of risk taking at work, a biology shared by athletes, politicians, soldiers - anyone who ventures beyond their safety zone.
Coates also discusses how men and women excel at different types of risk; how the stress of failure damages our health; and how we can train our bodies so that they help rather than hinder our risk taking. Revealing the biology behind bubbles and crashes, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf sheds new and surprising light on issues that affect us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Far from the preserve of cold-blooded rationalism, Wall Street is dominated by primitive drives and hormonal surges, argues this scintillating treatise on the neurobiology of the business cycle. Coates, a Cambridge neuroscientist and ex Wall Street trader whose previous studies have shown that male traders perform better when they have elevated morning testosterone levels, draws an intimate portrait of life on a trading floor, with its intuitive, rapid-fire deal making under pressure, as an almost physical athleticism directed by brain processes and chemistries evolved for less cerebral pursuits. As bond markets soar and slump, he notes, traders experience involuntary fight-or-flight reflexes, jolts of dopamine, and convulsions of the primal "gut brain." In bull markets, the euphoric boost in testosterone from successful trades fuels ever crazier risk taking until the inevitable collapse, when the defensive steroid cortisol takes over and turns financiers into risk-averse paralytics dependent on government bailout and stimulus. Coates takes economist John Maynard Keynes's idea of entrepreneurial "animal spirits" and grounds it in hard science, while introducing readers to a brain that's inseparably intertwined with a very demanding body. The result is a provocative and entertaining take on the irrational exuberance and anxiety of the modern economy.
Customer Reviews
Great Book, Little Long On Biology
This was a great recommendation and I find myself reflecting on it while on the desk. This goes a long way to explaining how I can be up substantially in positions and start thinking I can trade anything anywhere out of any set up only to regret it. The ‘trading/sales desk novel’ portion of the book are excellent. The detailed description of the biology is bit too deep and lengthy.
Fascinating ideas, and well written
The Hour between Dog and Wolf is a fascinating -- and specific -- exploration of the science of how our biology drives risk-taking and risk-averse behavior. The science is complex, and this book does not lend itself to three-bullet talking points for the popular press, but it is well worth the intellectual effort to understand. The power of this book comes from the fact that the author has expertise in both Wall Street trading and the biological science, a combination that is at the least very rare and perhaps actually unique. How lucky we are that he is an excellent writer as well. Splendid.