Explores the rarefied world of private equity investing through ethnographic fieldwork on private equity financiers. Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss documents how and why investors buy, manage, and sell; presents the ins and outs of private equity deals; and explains the historical context that gave rise to private equity.
A vivid, fast-paced inside look at financial markets, the people who work on them, and how technology is changing their world (and ours). Markets are messy, and no one knows this better than traders who work tirelessly to predict what they will do next. In Whoosh Goes the Market, Daniel Scott Souleles takes us into the day-to-day experiences of a team at a large trading firm, revealing what it's actually like to make and lose money on contemporary capital markets. The traders Souleles shadows have mostly moved out of the pits and now work with automated, glitch-prone computer systems. They remember the days of trading manually, and they are suspicious of algorithmically driven machine-learning systems. Openly musing about their own potential extinction, they spend their time expressing fear and frustration in profanity-laced language. With Souleles as our guide, we learn about everything from betting strategies to inflated valuations, trading swings, and market manipulation. This crash course in contemporary finance vividly reveals the existential anxiety at the evolving front lines of American capitalism.