What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars

Jim Paul’s meteoric rise took him from a small town in Northern Kentucky to Governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, yet he lost it all—his fortune, his reputation, and his job—in one fatal moment of excessive economic hubris. In this honest, frank analysis, Paul and Brendan Moynihan revisit the events that led up to Paul’s disastrous decision and examine the psychological factors behind bad financial practices in a number of economic sectors.The book begins with the unbroken string of successes that helped Paul achieve a jet-setting lifestyle and land a key spot with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It then describes the circumstances leading up to Paul’s $1.6 million loss and the essential lessons he learned from it—primarily that, although there are as many ways to make money in the markets as there are people participating in them, there are very few ways to produce a loss. People lose money in the markets either because of errors…Jim Paul (1943 – 2001) was First Vice President in charge of the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. International Energy Unit in New York City. During his twenty-five year career in the futures industry, he was a retail broker, floor trader, and research director, and served on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Board of Governors and the Executive Committee. Brendan Moynihan works at Marketfield Asset Management LLC, where his understanding of markets and the media helps shape their macro views and allocations. He is an adjunct professor of finance at Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management. He is also the author of Financial Origami: How the Wall Street Model Broke. He lives in Barrington Hills, Illinois, with his wife and two sons.