“The Golden Goose (CDO’s) turned into a Black Swan. Who knew?”

It wasn’t a black swan it was Heisenberg Uncertainty – You can’t measure the value of a CDO without (adversely) affecting its value.

> A better writer could have encapsulated the whole notion in 3, single-spaced pages

IMO, most business books are like that. A great idea or commentary that can be described in less than ten pages, plus another hundred or so pages of mind-numbing repetition in order to bring the page count up.

_Blink_ was a perfect example of that, as was _Execution_.

http://www.financialsense.com/fsn/main.html

What was $6 million in those days? Remember, 2006 was the year of “the Biggest Bulge Ever,” as the magazine tastefully put it, when “the bonus pool increased to a size almost beyond comprehension.” That was the year that Goldman Sachs famously distributed $16.5 billion to its employees, and if you were one of the lucky ones, Trader Monthly — “See It, Make It, Spend It,” was its slogan — stood ready to help you figure out how to blow your share properly, conspicuously, flamboyantly.

Oh, there were cars: Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Ferraris, Maseratis, sometimes described in the magazine’s characteristic tone of flippant indulgence. There were airplanes, reviewed and rated in a column specifically dedicated to that purpose.

There were Scotches, including, in the “Bonus Guide” for 2008, a $20,000 bottle of Johnnie Walker. There were watches, mechanical ones of course, and among the most desirable were the ones with transparent faces, presumably so the little gears were visible and everyone knew the timepiece was for real.

Reading through back issues of the magazine, which was published in Europe with distribution help from The Wall Street Journal Europe, one does not get the sense that its trader readers aspired to live this way because they were jolly bon vivants. Quite the opposite. At one point in its intermittent pursuit of the best possible record player, for example, Trader Monthly described what it claimed to be a $300,000 turntable as “a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home.”

If you didn’t understand why someone would want to greet their guests in such a way — and as a nation we certainly didn’t — then you didn’t understand what it meant to be a trader.

Do the world a favor. Put a trader in the poor house.

You might attract a different fan base than you expect.

As much as I agree with Nassim and BR, I don’t tolerate swearers in confined dining spaces well, and would have given you two an earful before I backed it up physically. If more ‘average guys’ had balls, loud foul mouths would realize theirs are made of glass.