The Big Short Audiobook - exclusive for Tlap.com readers

Hello, trader friends! We continue recording exclusive audiobooks, and following Zonal Trading and Memoirs of a Stock Operator, we have a new release ready - Michael Lewis's book The Big Short.

Yes, I understand that you have all watched the film made from this work. But in the book, it is the practical side of the question of how the global crisis of 2008 arose that is examined in more detail, whereas the film places more emphasis on spectacle. This is the story of how several traders earned billions by foreseeing the coming catastrophe. And this is one of those cases where the book is perceived much more easily in audio format than as text.

You will look behind the scenes of the global economy. You will learn how bubbles are inflated. How pyramids are built. And that the global economy in its essence is one big MMM.

How the people "at the top" make billions out of thin air. And how several people who realized the coming catastrophe managed to profit from it.

And, perhaps, you will understand more deeply what forex, the stock market, and the derivatives market are... And that it is not about strategies.... Or maybe you will not understand, everything has its time).

The book is not simple, there are a lot of terms. But you are traders, not housewives, right?)

In 2010, The Big Short received the title of "Book of the Year" in dozens of authoritative rankings, including Amazon, "The Economist" and "Bloomberg".

The audio version is read by Roman Volkov, Vargtroms Studio.

At the end of 2007 and in 2008, the global economy was going through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 2010, Michael Lewis, the author of The Blind Side and Moneyball, wrote about it in the book The Big Short. The Hidden Springs of the Financial Catastrophe, in whose plot insiders predicted the events that plunged the financial world into chaos.

The film adaptation of Lewis's star bestseller grossed 121 million dollars worldwide and received five Oscar nominations, including for "Best Picture".

Many of the film's heroes - who accurately predicted the crisis and got rich - still remain legends in the world of finance. Let's look at the real players behind the award-winning story, and at who they are now.

Dr. Michael Burry (Dr. Michael Burry, he was played by Christian Bale in the film)

Dr. Burry is still the CEO of the company he founded, Scion Asset Management, which appears in the film. This apparently prophetic figure is the only one featured in Lewis's book and in the film who allowed the filmmakers to use his real name. As for the ominous last frame of the film before the credits, which states that "Michael Burry focuses all his trading on a single commodity: water," Burry says that his position is not as ominous as it seems.

"Food is a way to invest in water," Burry told interviewers for New York magazine. "That is, to grow food in areas with high water content and transport it for sale to areas with low water content. This is a method of redistributing water that is the least controversial, and in the end it can be profitable, which will ensure sustainable redistribution. It takes more than 400 bottles of water to produce one bottle of wine. The water contained in food - that is what attracted my interest."

Steve Eisman (aka Mark Baum, he was played by Steve Carell in the film)

Hedge fund investor Steve Eisman currently works together with his parents, Elliott and Lillian Eisman, as a managing director of Eisman Group, the asset management group of the larger financial consulting company Neuberger Berman Group. In 2011, Eisman left the FrontPoint fund shown in the book and film after its co-portfolio manager, an executive at a healthcare company, was accused of insider trading. Eisman's current view of our financial future is not as bleak as Carell portrays in the film.

"If you read the newspapers, sometimes it seems that this could happen again, and from the very place where I sit - it is simply unrealistic," Eisman said in his interview with the Canadian daily The Globe and Mail. "Regulators clearly learned that they were wrong, and they did a lot to fix many problems. The banking system has probably not been this safe in my entire life."

Eisman also says that although he respects Carell's portrayal, it is not 100% accurate: "Take away my sense of humor and make me constantly angry. That is how they portrayed me.".

Greg Lippmann (aka Jared Vennett, he is played by Ryan Gosling in the film)

Like in the plot of the film, Lippmann was a top trader at Deutsche Bank, but left it, founding his own hedge fund LibreMax Capital in 2010, where he works as chief investment officer. According to the financial information provider Bloomberg, this hedge fund is focused on "a range of complex debt securities" and, reportedly, has been profitable since its creation. Next year Lippmann plans to create a new fund. Greg does not comment either on what he thinks of Gosling's performance or on the whole situation that happened.

Ben Hockett (aka Ben Rickert, portrayed by Brad Pitt in the film)

He does not let his photos get onto the internet. Therefore above is a photo of Brad Pitt from the film))

In keeping with Pitt's somewhat paranoid and arrogant image in the film, Hockett remains out of sight. "He has a house you won't be able to reach by car in the event of Armageddon," Pitt says in his interview for Vulture. "I like that."

Interestingly, the venue of Hockett's last multimillion-dollar deal in dollar terms, the Powder Monkey pub in the Exmouth area of Devon, England, made newspaper headlines due to the reliable Wi-Fi of the local establishment, which played an important role in the book and film. The pub staff until recently did not know about their important role in this story.

"He must have quietly gone about his business, since we have no way to distinguish him from other customers during that period," one of the employees told the British regional newspaper Western Daily Press. "It is somewhat shocking to hear about our role in this story, but it is very inspiring."

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Sincerely, Pavel Vlasov Tlap.io