Roger Lowenstein's account of the spectacular rise and near-collapse of Long-Term Capital Management is one of the most instructive stories in financial history and a cautionary tale that remains urgently relevant. LTCM was founded in 1994 by John Meriwether, legendary Salomon Brothers bond trader, and staffed with an extraordinary team that included two Nobel Prize-winning economists — Myron Scholes and Robert Merton — alongside dozens of PhDs and Wall Street veterans. For four years, the fund generated extraordinary returns by exploiting tiny arbitrage opportunities across global bond markets using enormous amounts of borrowed capital. At its peak, LTCM controlled over $125 billion in assets with equity of only $4 billion, a leverage ratio that made the entire global financial system hostage to its continued success. When the 1998 Russian debt default triggered a flight to liquidity that violated all historical correlations LTCM's models assumed, the fund lost $4.6 billion in under four months and required a Federal Reserve-orchestrated bailout to prevent a systemic crisis. Lowenstein's account reveals how intellectual arrogance, over-reliance on quantitative models, and the seductive logic of past returns created a fragility invisible to almost everyone involved until it was nearly too late.