John Malcolm was the ultimate gunslinger in the Wild East,prepared to take on any level of risk in making mind-boggling sums of money.While this is a true story, many of the names are fictitious, including "John Malcolm." I have used the real names of historical figures or those widely reported in the news, such as Joseph Jett, Nick Leeson,and Richard Li. Otherwise, no character in the book is meant to refer specifically to a real-life person. Also, regarding job titles and positions at companies that were actually in existence at the time the events in the book took place, they should not be read to refer to any specific people who were actually employed by those companies at any time.

Ugly Americans is the true story of John Malcolm,a hungry young Princeton grad who traveled halfway around the world in search of the American dream and ultimately pulled off a trade that could, quite simply, be described as the biggest deal in the history of the financial markets.

After receiving a mysterious phone call promising him a shot at great fortune in an exotic land, Malcolm packed up his few belongings and took the chance of a lifetime. Without speaking a word of Japanese, with barely a penny in his pocket, Malcolm was thrown into the bizarre, adrenaline-fueled life of an expat trader.Surrounded by characters ripped right out of a Hollywood thriller, he quickly learned how to survive in a cutthroat world--at the feet of the biggest players the markets have ever known.

 Malcolm was first an assistant trading huge positions for Nick Leeson, the twenty-six-year-old rogue trader who lost nearly two billion dollars and brought down Barings Bank--the oldest in England. Then he was the right-hand man to an enigmatic and brilliant hedge-fund cowboy named Dean Carney, and grew into one of the biggest derivatives traders in all of Asia. Along the way, Malcolm fell in love with the daughter of a Yakuza gangster, built a vast fortune out of thin air, and came head-to-head with the violent Japanese mobsters who helped turn the Asian markets into the turbulent casino it is today.