My older brother went to one of those magnet high schools in Korea that sent half the class to Ivy leagues. His high school had a NYT article written about having one of the highest average SAT scores in the world (2200+ something?). I remember one of his best friends went to a US college and worked at SAC capital before the collapse. Towards the end of my high school, my brother gave me a copy of this book and told me this lore.

Took me a couple years to get to it, but the tale is really fascinating. The writer is clearly a journalist, and it does in a way feel like you're reading one long WSJ article. But it still injects enough realism and atmospheric elements that treat the story like a "story". It's an unbelievable tale overall.

Steve Cohen arguably has one of the most fascinating origin stories in high finance. He's not a math savant like Jim Simons, he's not a statistics and computer genius like Ken Griffin or David Shaw, he's not a macro guy with well rounded sharp intellect like Bill Ackman, Chase Coleman, Carl Icahn, or others. He's incredibly smart sure, but no one really understands how he's so good at trading. The author attributes this as his "sixth sense".

Sure, you can argue that he's good because he clearly leveraged insider information. But if you really look, it's clear that he was always ahead of the curve even before he leverage insider information. I think his unexplainable and intuitive understanding of equity trading is almost mythical. How could this be? How can a guy, who is competing in the most competitive market in the history of human civilization, keep winning again and again without using sophisticated models or a savant-tier brain? It's baffling, truly.