RaveThe Wall Street Journal... a magisterial, delightfully written history offering up portraits of the academic scribblers and entrepreneurial practitioners who created the index-fund revolution. It also contains common-sense wisdom that will benefit all investors ... [Wigglesworth] turns an arcane and potentially dull tale into a rip-roaring yarn.
Diana B. Henriques
MixedThe Wall Street JournalIn addition to describing Black Monday’s frantic activity, Ms. Henriques presents a narrative history of the seven years preceding the crash. It is rich in interviews and archival research and personalized with vivid descriptions of the actors and conflicts involved. Ms. Henriques uses this history to trace the changes in market structure and portfolio management that, she believes, were responsible for the market collapse. Her writing is so skillful that even mathematical risk-mitigation techniques and arcane turf wars between regulatory agencies are infused with life … To be sure, portfolio-insurance trades magnified the decline on Black Monday. But markets all over the world declined just as sharply as the U.S. market, and they didn’t have similar futures markets. Moreover, markets remained below their 1987 summer peak for the next two years. It is unsupportable to claim that the institutional structure of the U.S. market and a lack of unified regulation were responsible for the crash.
