The author, Michael Lewis, introduces his firm, Salomon Brothers, an investment bank that specializes in the rough-and-tumble world of bond trading and that, during the 1980s, “was somewhere near the center of a modern gold rush” (9). Fortunes are made by young men in New York and London due to “a rare and amazing glitch in the fairly predictable history of getting and spending” (10). Lewis himself does well and makes a lot of money, and he holds no grudges.

The epigraph quotes Frederick Schwed, Jr.’s book Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? Wall Street has a river at one end (the East River) and a cemetery at the other (Trinity Church Cemetery), with a kindergarten in between (Wall Street itself).

Lewis begins at his bond-trading firm, Salomon Brothers, in 1986. Its chairman, John Gutfreund, dubbed “the King of Wall Street” by Business Week (14), can strike terror into the hearts of traders merely by walking up behind them and watching them work. Gutfreund’s best trader is John Meriwether, a man so cool-headed that no one can ever tell by his manner whether he is winning or losing in the bond market.