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.No one partied harder than those guys but then they really only partied with themselves. It was kinda like Boiler Room. The Dot Com boom is the stuff of legends but these guys left nothing on the table.Barclays had a riff and ordered a string of cabs to take people home. One of them stepped into the cab and said Vegas.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.They didn’t learn anything.