最伟大的交易-The_Greatest_Trade_Ever.DOC

The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind- the-scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History Cover The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied WallStreet and Made Financial History TO DAD AND TO MOM, MY TEACHERS, MY FOUNDATION TO MICHELLE, GABRIEL, AND ELIJAH, MY JOY, MY INSPIRATION introduction The tip was intriguing. It was the fall of 2007, financial markets were collapsing, and WallStreet firms were losing massive amounts of money, as if they were trying to give back a dec-ade’s worth of profits in a few brutal months. But as I sat at my desk at The Wall StreetJournal tallying the pain, a top hedge-fund manager called to rave about an investor namedJohn Paulson who somehow was scoring huge profits. My contact, speaking with equal partsenvy and respect, grabbed me with this: “Paulson’s not even a housing or mortgage guy.…... And until this trade, he was run-of-the-mill, nothing special.” There had been some chatter that a few little-known investors had anticipated the housingtroubles and purchased obscure derivative investments that now were paying off. But few de-tails had emerged and my sources were too busy keeping their firms afloat and their careersalive to offer very much. I began piecing together Paulson’s trade, a welcome respite fromthe gory details of the latest banking fiasco. Cracking Paulson’s moves seemed at least as in-structive as the endless mistakes of the financial titans. Riding the bus home one evening through the gritty New Jersey streets of Newark andEast Orange, I did some quick math. Paulson hadn’t simply met with success—--he had rungup the biggest financial coup in history, the greatest trade ever recorded. All from a rank out-sider in the world of real estate investing—--could it be? The more I learned about Paulson and the obstacles he overcame, the more intrigued Ibecame, especially when I discovered he wasn’t alone—--a group of gutsy, co