Today, after eight months of writing, I’m launching my second book. Market Mayhem is now live on Amazon Kindle.
If you’ve followed this site or the podcast, you already know the framework: Mind · Method · Money. The first book, The Complete Trader’s Edge, taught it from the ground up — 70 chapters on building a trader from scratch.
This new book does the opposite. It applies the same framework backwards — through four hundred years of bubbles, crashes, and the people who got destroyed by them.
Why this book exists
Every generation of traders thinks their bubble is different. It never is.
I noticed a pattern years ago, somewhere between studying Tulip Mania for fun and watching FTX implode in real time. Different decades, different assets, different language — but the same blueprint. The same psychology. The same broken risk discipline. The same charismatic operator promising that this time the rules don’t apply.
Market Mayhem is the result of that pattern recognition exercise. Twenty-two chapters. Eighteen of history’s worst financial disasters dissected through the M·M·M lens, plus four framework chapters that connect them.
What’s inside
The book opens with three framework chapters — Anatomy of Mania, The Cup of Greed, and Mind · Method · Money — that establish the lens.
Then comes the parade of disasters, in chronological order:
- 1637 — Tulip Mania, Amsterdam
- 1720 — The Mississippi Bubble (Paris) and the South Sea Bubble (London) in the same year
- 1845 — Britain’s Railway Mania
- 1890 — Encilhamento in Brazil
- 1929 — Black Tuesday on Wall Street
- 1980 — The Hunt Brothers cornering silver
- 1982 — Souk Al-Manakh in Kuwait, plus the Latin American debt crisis
- 1987 — Black Monday
- 1989 — Japan’s lost decades
- 1997-98 — The Asian Financial Crisis and LTCM’s collapse
- 2000 — The Dot-Com Crash
- 2001 — Argentina’s Corralito
- 2008 — The Global Financial Crisis
- 2010 — The Flash Crash
- 2022 — FTX and the crypto collapse
The final chapter — The Next One — is a field guide. It tells you what to look for in the bubble that’s already forming somewhere right now.
Reading order: doesn’t matter
Read it cover-to-cover the first time, in order. After that, jump anywhere. Each chapter is a self-contained story that closes with the M·M·M takeaway. You can pick it up at chapter 11 (LTCM) or chapter 18 (Lehman) without missing context.
How it pairs with the first book
The two books are designed to read together but stand alone. The Complete Trader’s Edge is the textbook — psychology, strategy, risk management as a unified system. Market Mayhem is the case study collection that proves why the textbook matters. Read either first and the other becomes deeper for it.
You don’t need book one to understand book two. The framework is restated cleanly in chapter three. But if you’ve read the first book, you’ll catch resonances on every page — the same lessons, dressed in different centuries.
The companion podcast
Market Mayhem is also a podcast. Eighteen episodes — one per disaster — released weekly through August. Six are already live, the rest are scheduled. Each episode is structured as seven cinematic acts and runs about an hour. The podcast and book cover the same material, but the book goes deeper on the framework analysis.
Listen on Spotify or watch on YouTube.
Where to get it
Kindle is live now at $9.99 USD — available worldwide, instant download, includes all 22 chapters and the embedded sigil illustrations.
Paperback and Premium Color editions are processing through Amazon’s review queue and should be live in 7–10 days. The B&W paperback will be $24.99 on cream stock; the colour edition $39.99 on white premium paper, with all sigils rendered in full colour.
When Greed Meets Gravity.
Four hundred years of bubbles, crashes, and the pattern that keeps repeating.
One last thing
If you read the book, please leave a review on Amazon. Reviews are the difference between a book that finds its readers and a book that disappears. Even one sentence helps. The first 20 reviews matter more than the next 200.
Thanks for reading. Thanks for sticking with this project. Thanks for being part of the small group that takes this craft seriously.
The next Tuesday morning is already forming. Let’s see it before it arrives.
— Louw
