Guy Lawson
Octopus ,is a real-life thriller that tells the inside story of an audacious hedge fund fraud and the wild search, by a colorful cast of rogues and schemers, for a â€œsecret marketâ€ beneath the financial market we all know.,Â ,Sam Israel was a man who seemed to have it all â€“ until the hedge fund he ran, Bayou, imploded and he became the target of a nationwide manhunt.Â  Born into one of Americaâ€™s most illustrious trading families, Israel was determined to strike out on his own.Â  So after apprenticing with one of the greatest hedge fund traders of the 1980â€™s, Sam founded his own fund and promised his investors ,guaranteed ,profits.Â  With the proprietary computer program heâ€™d created, he claimed to be able to predict the future. ,Â ,But his future was already beginning to unravel.,Â ,After suffering devastating losses and fabricating fake returns, Israel knew it was only a matter of time before his ,real ,performance would be discovered, so when a former black-ops intelligence operative told him about a â€œsecret marketâ€ run by the Fed, Israel bet his last $150 million on a chance to make billions. Thus began his year-long adventure in â€œthe Upperworldâ€ -- a society populated by clandestine bankers, shady European nobility, and spooks issuing cryptic warnings about a mysterious cabal known as the Octopus. ,Â ,Whether the â€œsecret marketâ€ was real or a con, Israel was all in â€“ and as the pressures mounted and increasingly sinister violence crept into his life, he struggled to break free of the Octopusâ€™ tentacles.
Nonfiction,Economics,Crime,True Crime,Economics,Finance,Biography,Mystery,Crime,Business,History,Politics,Biography Memoir
Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street's Wildest Con