In the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, the Japanese stock market plunged by twenty percent over two days, in the least talked about flash-crash in history, triggering margin calls and putting several brokers and investors out of business. "The Volatility Smirk" is a financial thriller inspired by those events and presents a unique mistery angle whilst encompassing a wide variety of topics from black swans to Mahayana Buddhism. The main character, Ken Rochat is a hardened Japanese - European former banker who is struggling to pitch his budding investment management business to investors, whilst haunted by the specter of the loss of a close friend and an overzealous government officer. As he puts on risky positions on derivative contracts on the Nikkei 225 Index, a powerful earthquake jolts Tokyo. He will get caught in a series of tumultuous, seemingly random events ultimately exposing a multi-layered conspiracy involving a billionaire hedge fund tycoon, a femme fatale of many resources and a mysterious ship moored in the middle of Tokyo Bay. Other than the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, the book nods to several true events that occurred in the Japanese financial markets in the past thirty years including the debacle of Yamaichi Securities and many others, taking the reader through the mores of Japan's corporate and bureaucracy worlds, with fleeting glimpses of its night-time, dark underworld. Although ultimately it unfolds into a financial thriller, the book presents the author's take on technical issues such as option pricing, black swans and the role of market makers. As a noir, it is also a story of existentialism, introspection and atonement for some of the characters, encompassing themes including Jungian psychology's concept of synchronicity, the tenets of the Lotus Sutra, the nihilism of Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy and Japan's autochthonous religion and folklore.

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• Literature & FictionAction & Adventure

• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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• Print Length: 333 Pages
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