Written in the first person, the book follows a trader from the night he first read the odds on a football line at sixteen to a career spent across London, Paris, Chicago, Naples, Irvine, Hawaii, Dallas, Barcelona and Arizona. Each chapter settles in one city and one options structure: the diagonal spread, the intraday iron condor, premium selling, the butterfly, the ratio spread, the risk reversal.

Every trade is told with its strikes, implied volatility and profit and loss, so the reader sees why each position made sense and the exact moment it stopped making sense. Running alongside are Mahler’s Fifth, Turner’s storms, Rembrandt’s shadows, the last road of Bonnie and Clyde and the bells of the Sagrada Família, art and markets annotating each other.

It is a book about winning, and more about what winning costs: a Waterloo after twenty-seven times, a Gamma reversal after seven, an SEC inquiry after eight. The author records his own arrogance and luck, and how he learned to shut his mistakes into smaller boxes, survive, and come back to the market.

Contents

Preface: Time, the Invisible Market Maker

Chapter One: Odds and Equilibrium

Chapter Two: The Slope in the Fog

Chapter Three: Forgeries and Vintages

Chapter Four: The Geometry of Sisyphus

Chapter Five: The Rent of Time

Chapter Six: The Eye of the Storm

Chapter Seven: At the Flood

Chapter Eight: The Price of Shadows

Chapter Nine: The Other Half of Fortune

Chapter Ten: Against the Current