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This discusses the way in which Sekai Securities traders read Wall Street securities analyst Jack D. Schwager's book Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders (1993). Generally, discipline is a popular term in the world of trading, but in the Sekai Securities trading room, it was explicitly related to Schwager's book. Indeed, discipline is one of the most important lessons Schwager draws from his interviews with highly successful U.S.-based traders. The chapter argues that Sekai traders' interest in the idea of discipline in Schwager's book points to their paradoxical fascination with their American counterparts as those from whom they simultaneously need to learn and differentiate themselves. It draws particular attention to Sekai traders' collective experience of learning—a celebrated virtue and a dominant modality of being in the Japanese corporate world—as a hindrance to arbitrage operations and the discipline they demanded. Confronting the limits of learning as a modality of engagement with the market, the Sekai arbitrageurs who participated in this study began to apprehend America as a signifier of a new form of subjectivity.

This chapter illustrates the relationship between techniques of finance and traders' dreams and intellectual trajectories as manifested in a handout created by Sasaki, a mathematician turned trader, for a training session for new members of his derivatives development team. This document contains both an important insight about finance—the centrality of arbitrage in derivatives trading—and Sasaki's personal dream of contributing to academic knowledge about financial mathematics. The chapter analyzes the significance of a so-called “bibliographical autobiography” in light of arbitrage's self-canceling tendency as evidenced in the way arbitrageurs exploit and eliminate arbitrage opportunities and ultimately themselves. This tendency is evident in Sasaki's reading of an analysis of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice by the economist Katsuhito Iwai.

This chapter focuses derivatives trader Tada, and his fascination with the kind of transparency that he believed money would bring to his relationship with himself. The starting point of the discussion is a spreadsheet Tada created in January 1999, after his trading team was disbanded, to compute his own market value. As a result of this calculation, Tada took a greater risk than he had ever taken in his career and quit Sekai Securities to join an independent investment fund. The chapter traces the trajectory of Tada's changing views on the relationship between money and what he termed “self-realization.” It examines his heroic effort to arbitrage every possible inefficient market in Japan and the relationship of this effort to his own personal dreams, which included making enough money to retire early and bicycle around Japan.

This chapter discusses a business plan that derivatives trader Aoki crafted in his effort to raise money for a hypnotherapy clinic that would specialize in addressing the psychological problems of Japanese youth. The business plan as a genre of writing became salient in the early 2000s, in the midst of the rise of the culture of venture capitalism in Japan. As a former antiwar student activist turned trader, Aoki sought to revisit his youthful passion to change Japan and tackle what he saw as the negative consequences of Japan's uncompromising pursuit of economic growth. The discussion focuses on the debate concerning this project between Aoki and Tada, who helped Aoki draft the business plan. The debate ultimately points to the two financial market professionals' complex views on the role of belief in the market and in life, and the possibility of an exit from finance and capitalism. Using this debate and the contrast between the two men's seemingly different dreams of an exit from their work, the chapter brings to light a particular kind of commitment emerging at the intersections of arbitrage and arbitrageurs' lives, a commitment to keep in view both an endpoint to their work and the endlessness of their work.

Global swap markets are seen as economically irrational, financially dangerous, and prone to ethical abuse, another dimension of the same market has emerged as solid, respected, and even morally and ethically empowered. This chapter focuses on an element known as collateral. Collateral survived during a time of major changes in market ideologies with its reputation intact when so much else of what once was unquestionable belief—free markets, self-regulation, the innate brilliance, and rationality of derivatives traders—now seems like a quaint mythology from a strange other world. In the simple technology of collateral, this nexus of paper documents, legal theories, legal experts, clerical staff, computer technologies, statutes, and court decisions are encapsulated by some very grand hopes. As a transplanted legal technology, collateralization is paradigmatic of global private law solutions. Although collateral is rooted in multiple bodies of national law, it is also a device for running an end-game around certain aspects of national law, such as national bankruptcy codes. Global governance has increasingly become private governance—regulation through technical legal devices that take power out of the hands of public entities and put it in the hands of private individuals, corporations, and armies.