This blog post is a quick summary of the book “Chaos Kings” written by Scott Patterson

The book narrates the story of two funds - Empirica and Universa, the stories of their founders, the difficulties in getting investments in to the fund, the way the fund managers used a range of convincing strategies to bring in investments in to the fund. Starting from nothing in 2007, the Universa now boasts 16 Billion dollars by 2023. How did it happen ? Scott Patterson peels the story around all the events around Universa and in doing so also talks about Emprica, which was the fund that was precursor to Universa.

The book revolves around founders of Empirica - Taleb and Spitznagel

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Mark Spitznagel

The book also gives a narrative around many other individuals. The author goes in to a bit more depth in weaving the stories of the following people:

Didier Sornette

Yaneer Bar-Yam

Robert Bob Litterman

Marcus Schmalbach

Here is a quick mindmap of the various topics/individuals discussed in the book

Takeaway

Like most of the previous Scott Patterson books, this book is a page-turner. If you want to know the details about how a fund went from scratch to a 16 billion dollar fund by 2023, with out predicting any event in the market, you will find the book interesting.