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Cover of What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars Columbia Business School Publishing

How long does it take to read What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars Columbia Business School Publishing?

Jim Paul

What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars Columbia Business School Publishing by Jim Paul takes about 3 hours 6 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 3 hours 6 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2013. 169 pages, about 46,475 words.

7 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 5 hours 10 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 3 hours 6 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 1 hour 56 minutes

The page count is the median across 1 edition, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

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 attack of excessive economic hubris. In this honest, frank analysis, Paul and Brendan Moynihan revisit the events that led to Paul's disastrous decision and examine the psychological factors behind bad financial practices in several economic sectors. This 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, all losses come from the same few sources. Investors lose money in the markets either because of errors in their analysis or because of psychological barriers preventing the application of analysis. While all analytical methods have some validity and make allowances for instances in which they do not work, psychological factors can keep an investor in a losing position, causing him to abandon one method for another in order to rationalize the decisions already made. Paul and Moynihan's cautionary tale includes strategies for avoiding loss tied to a simple framework for understanding, accepting, and dodging the dangers of investing, trading, and speculating.

Subjects: Commodity exchanges, Speculation, Psychological aspects

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