What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)
I crewed on a sailboat in YRA races leading up to and during the 2008-9 crash. It was mostly people from Lehman and Barclays. I was the only SV guy on the boat.<p>No one partied harder than those guys but then they really only partied with themselves. It was kinda like <i>Boiler Room.</i> The Dot Com boom is the stuff of legends but these guys left nothing on the table.<p>Barclays had a riff and ordered a string of cabs to take people home. One of them stepped into the cab and said <i>Vegas</i>.<p>For all that they were wrong about everything. Highly paid, quite sure of themselves but wrong. Basically they were poker players (and they played a lot of poker) but they weren’t very good. It was just other people’s money so who cared.<p>They didn’t learn anything.