Summary of David Enrich's The Spider Network

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of David Enrich's The Spider Network in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Tom Hayes, a brilliant but troubled mathematician, became the lynchpin of a shadowy team that used hook and crook to take over the process and set rates that made them a fortune, no matter the cost to others. Among the motley crew was a French trader nicknamed “Gollum”; the broker “Abbo,” who liked to publicly strip naked when drinking; a Kazakh chicken farmer turned something short of financial whiz kid; an executive called “Clumpy” because of his patchwork hair loss; and a broker uncreatively nicknamed “Big Nose.” Eventually known as the “Spider Network,” Hayes’s circle generated untold riches —until it all unraveled in spectacularly vicious, backstabbing fashion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Dec 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781669343592

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Insights on David Enrich's The Spider Network

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Chris Cecere was one of the ringleaders that night. He was the American in charge of pushing Citigroup into risky financial frontiers. He also was responsible for fostering camaraderie amongst his subordinates.

#2

When he returned to the party, Hayes was unable to keep down the Jägermeister he’d been drinking. He threw up, then rejoined the celebration.

#3

Three years later, in January 2013, the author was sitting on a sofa in his cramped apartment in London’s Clerkenwell neighborhood when his phone buzzed with a text message from a number he didn’t recognize. It was from a terrified Tom Hayes.

#4

The author had spent nearly a decade writing about banks and their misdeeds, but this was a misdeed unlike any other. The conspirators were fiddling with something that few people paid much attention to, but the stakes were high, and even small-scale tinkering had the capacity to generate fat profits with commensurate losses affecting the often unsophisticated victims.

#5

The author began to see the saga as rooted in a corrupt, broken financial system and the minimal regulatory infrastructure that supposedly kept it in check. Hayes’s moral compass was clearly skewed, as he was diagnosed with mild autism.

Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Tom Hayes was a ten-year-old student at Brackenbury Primary School in 1990, who was known as being aggressive and difficult to deal with. He was also a gifted mathematician.

#2

When he was younger, Hayes was bullied for his poor attitude and his appearance. He developed a passion for collecting train tickets and metal army figures, but his true love was math.

#3

Hayes was a fan of the author, and he would send him emails about his stock market investments. The author would forward these emails to his readers, and this eventually caught the attention of a Wall Street Journal reporter.

#4

At age 15, Hayes moved to England with his parents and brother, and he went to the University of Nottingham. He specialized in math and physics, but he also enjoyed debating and found a talent for it.

#5

Sandy’s son Hayes was a prodigy who could have had a very different life if he had gotten that summer job at the University of Oxford. Instead, he spent that summer and the next working behind the bar at the Winchester tennis and squash club near where Sandy and Tim lived.

#6

A market maker is a type of trader who specializes in buying and selling financial products in a specific market. They do this to hedge their position, protecting themselves from any potential losses while still making a profit.

#7

Traders were given more freedom in the 1980s, and the increased amount of trading that took place was not necessarily for the benefit of the public.

#8

The shift from a traditional investment banking career to a more mathematical career in finance occurred in the 1970s, when the U. S. economy began to slow down. Engineering and math-focused students began to flock to investment banks, attracted by the high salaries and the opportunity to utilize their technical skills in a creative way.

#9

The author met one man who had quit his job at a major investment bank to become a truck driver. His name is Chris Salmon, and he is the author's uncle.

#10

There were no classes where wannabe traders