Critical Praise forThe Alchemy of Finance

The Alchemy of Finance joins Reminiscences of a Stock Operator as a timeless instructional guide of the marketplace.

Paul Tudor Jones From the Foreword to the First Edition

An extraordinary . . . inside look into the decision-making process of the most successful money manager of our time. Fantastic.

The Wall Street Journal

A breathtakingly brilliant book. Soros is one of the core of masters . . . who can actually begin to digest the astonishing complexity . . . of the game of finance in recent years.

Esquire

A seminal investment book . . . it should be read, underlined, and thought about page by page, concept by idea. . . . He's the best pure investor ever . . . probably the finest analyst of the world in our time.

Barton M. Biggs Director, BKF Capital Group, Inc.

Updated to include a new Preface and Introduction by Soros, and a Foreword by Paul A. Volcker

George Soros is unquestionably the most powerful and profitable investor in the world today. Dubbed by BusinessWeek as "The Man Who Moves Markets," Soros once made a billion dollars by betting that the British pound would be devalued. Soros is not merely a man of finance, but a thinker to reckon with as well. In The Alchemy of Finance, this extraordinary man reveals the investment strategies that have made him "a superstar among money managers"(The New York Times).

• Theory
  • Reflexivity in the Stock Market
  • Reflexivity in the Currency Market
  • The Credit and Regulatory Cycle

• Historical perspective
  • The International Debt Problem
  • The Collective System of Lending
  • Reagan's Imperial Circle
  • Evolution of the Banking System
  • The "Oligopolarization" of America

• The real-time experiment.
  • The Starting Point: August 1985
  • Phase 1: August 1985-December 1985
  • Control Period: January 186-July 1986
  • Phase 2: July 1986-November 1986
  • The Conclusion: November 1986

• Evaluation
  • The Scope for Financial Alchemy: An Evaluation of the Experiment
  • The Quandary of the Social Sciences

• Prescription
  • Free Markets Versus Regulation
  • Toward an International Central Bank
  • The Paradox of Systemic Reform
  • The Crash of '87

• Notes
• Appendix