Market Mayhem: A Four-Hundred-Year History of Bubbles, Manias, and the Traders Who Survived Them (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798196480478)

From the tulip-fevered taverns of seventeenth-century Haarlem to the FTX collapse in twenty twenty-two, the same drama has played out in twenty-two acts across four hundred years. The faces change. The instruments change. The technology changes. The pattern does not.

Market Mayhem is a panoramic history of the worst financial disasters in modern memory - told as story, not as textbook. Inside, you'll meet:

• The Dutch weavers who mortgaged their homes for a single flower bulb
• The convicted murderer who talked the King of France into handing him an entire economy
• Sir Isaac Newton, the smartest man alive, who lost his fortune chasing the South Sea bubble
• The brothers who tried to corner the world's silver - and almost broke the United States banking system
• The Nobel Prize winners whose mathematical certainty bankrupted Long-Term Capital Management
• The Argentinians who watched their savings evaporate behind the locked gates of el corralito
• The high-frequency-trading algorithm that vaporised a trillion dollars of market value in nine minutes
• The crypto founder in cargo shorts who lost eight billion dollars of customer money

Each chapter follows a recurring pattern - setup, boom, euphoria, the crack, wreckage, survivors - and closes with the lessons every trader must learn or relearn. You will see, with alarming clarity, that the worst trades you have ever made are the same trades human beings have been making since 1637.

Drawn together under the Mind - Method - Money framework that has helped thousands of traders find their edge, Market Mayhem is the book the markets keep writing whether anyone reads it or not.

If you have ever bought at the top, you are in better company than you know.

Louw van Riet is the founder of Complete Trader's Edge and the author of The Complete Trader's Edge. He writes about market history, behavioural psychology, and the long arithmetic of risk.