I thought this book was a little like learning Spanish while on a space hopper. While you did feel that you were taking things in, you couldn't help but think it jumped around too much, and the loss of cohesion made it more difficult to really digest some of the themes.

Did we really needed to be reminded about the noodle company every five minutes? It just made me really hungry..

educational read of finance doublespeak

Definitely not one of the better books on the subject. There are two major faults with this one:

First, the writing is all over the place, with the author jumping hither and thither every other paragraph, with almost no cohesion.

Second, there are a great deal of technical bits that are not explained well at all, and some times they don't even need to be that technical.

Some interesting anecdotes and case studies, all marred by these downsides.

you need to be ablo to forecast the future to be able to price the options, but if you can forecast the future what do you need options for anyway?

I cannot say enough good things about this book. Anyone hoping to understand the existing financial world ought to read Traders Guns and Money first. Then he should carefully avoid all other financial books and reread this one whenever he feels an itch to speculate in financial markets.

What is best about this one is that every word is carefully chosen. How Das managed this I have no idea. One comes away with the helpless feeling that while every asset has a price, value is a thing of the past. In this circumstance, what ought an investor to do? I have some ideas but why should I share them with you?

The conventional justification for derivatives trading claims that it permits risk to be shifted to those willing and able to absorb it. Das makes proper hash of this idea. He explains how in fact risk is difficult to identify, and that when highly leveraged actors strive simultaneously to avoid it, what we get is musical chairs among the overcompensated, and a leaning tower of Ponzi to which the prosperity of all becomes hostage. Of course, we had this lesson from Long Term Capital Management more than ten years ago.

Das provides an indellible portrait of our current world of limitless money, in which ninety percent of our citizens have only what they can borrow at 30%. Our government is busily destroying the nation's credit to preserve a system in which 1% of the population owns everything worth owning. If people understood this there would be a revolution or at least a general strike or two, but similar situations have existed throughout American history without social consequences. What is different now, of course, is that understanding the situation doesn't really help when it comes to personal survival. That is our new paradigm. As the French say, 'sauve qui peut.'

This book is an excellent read. It opens with a fictional account of a typical deal gone bad and works from there to explain where the derivatives market started and how it developed over the years.

Satayajit is able to explain complicated concepts in a way that makes sense and his expertise on the subject is very evident. I actually liked the writing style too - between the fiction of the opening chapter, the humourous description of office life had me laughing out loud at times, as well as all the technical explanations!

The book confirms every investors worst fear about Wall Street and how they consistently pick the pockets of their clients and the fact that many managers of Investment banks didn't understand the toxicity of the products they thought were making them billions.

This is a fascinating book and a good read. Mr. Das does a great job of explaining in simple terms how some fairly complex financial instruments work and he does it with style. He is also an entertaining cynic, and he takes the reader through the underside of the banking industry in a very readable way.

In some ways this is absolute comedy, and for a while I was caught up in the amusement of seeing a "Flashman" weaving his way through the world of high finance, but ultimately the tales of mendacity and sheer greed, unaccompanied by any focus on value to customers, tend to wear me down. Many of us knew the risks of these products, but credulous buyers bought the pitch whole.

For a quality book, and this is one, there are a few miscues. Any book that mentions Warren Buffett as often as this one does (nine times in the index) should at least spell his name correctly.

Also, Das does correctly note that the origin of currency swaps and interest rate swaps in the mid 1970's - the basis of modern derivatives --arose out of the parallel loan market (at 34-37), but he gets the first parties and transactions wrong. Starting in early 1976, a series of such agreements was done by Monsanto Company, the first of which was with Imperial Chemical Industries Limited, quickly followed by others with Rank Xerox, Hanson Trust and others. Interestingly, these were invented by a small group of lawyers in a London conference room to solve a legal problem and in fact to reduce risk - with no involvement by investment bankers. Of course, Goldman Sachs, who represented Monsanto (and maybe ICI too), saw a product that it could sell to others, and the market was off and running, leading to all kinds of variations and new risks. How do I know this? I still have a copy of the original swap. See my article on the origin of derivatives at [...]

Entertaining, insightful, skeptical rather than cynical. This book opens the can of worms that is Derivatives and those that peddle them. As someone who has spent the last 12 years selling trading systems in to this group, it was fascinating to gain an insight as to why TARNs, PRDC and the Range Accruals were so important. I was very interested to understand the real thinking underlying the various products, many of which have I have had to workshop/demonstrate as part of the sales process when banks go to market for a new trading system.

This is a good book written by someone who has seen it all, he clearly outlines why the trading floors of the major financial centers are little more than casinos that close at 5pm. The lead-in to the recent Credit crisis is well handled in chapter 9.

My only worry now is where now do I invest my pension fund?

Very well written. Loved it

"In 1998, I was talking to the head of trading for a bank.  'Thank God for the Asian crisis,' he said.  I expressed surprise.  The bank had lost over $1 billion, blaiming the collapse of Asian markets.  'You have no idea what we were able to write-off,' he said with a broad grin."

Satyajit Das' jaundiced view on investments & investment managers is a wry & entertaining read.  Whether moving products or currencies from one country to another or enhancing return on investments or helping to manage risk, a derivative should be metaphorically compared to the legendary Fugu fish: if not prepared properly, it is fatal.

An added bonus can be found within these pages.  While given conditions for buying cherry investments are listed in El-Erian's WHEN MARKETS COLLIDE (see the Theory of Lemons), conditions for selling investments are found in TRADERS, GUNS, & MONEY (see the Law of Financial Gravity).

Great book.

This book is well written, and explains how derivatives work, and how they are traded.  The writer has an excellent sense of humor, and clarifies some difficult to understand concepts.  This book helps to explain a lot of the problems we've seen in financial markets in the past years, and doesn't make you feel any better about the future of financial markets.