Sunday, March 24, 2013

"OCTOPUS"- SAM ISRAEL, THE SECRET MARKET, AND WALL STREET'S WILDEST CON by Guy Lawson

Finished Su 3/24/13

My post at Good Reads-


The book reads like a thriller, and doesn't get bogged down in the minutia of high finance. It's kind of like FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS goes to Wall Street.

Sam Israel was a prominent Wall Street investor, and the founder of the Bayou Hedge Fund. He was a greedy, larger-than-life character, and OCTOPUS is the fascinating story of his downfall. Although he deftly conned his investors for more and more cash to keep the fund afloat, he falls prey to one of the wildest cons of all. Robert Booth Nichols, a shadowy figure with questionable links to numerous espionage outfits and international investment firms talks Israel into believing in a fantastic and secret, global investment market which is available only to the powerful people who control all the money on the planet. At face value, you would think that a serious trader such as Sam Israel would instantly smell a rat. But, I guess this is what the book is about. If you are a schemer, you are more than likely to fall prey to another schemer.

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