Soros's success is well known, but he wrote this book from 1985 to 1987. More than 30 years ago, he was not famous at that time. His fame was greatly shocked when 1992 defeated the Bank of England a few years later, earning190 billion dollars a day and triggering 1900. In the financial market, people often compare him with Buffett. Both of them have achieved great success, but their methods and investment ideas are completely different. We all know that Buffett is a long-term investor, and this book shows that Soros is a short-term trader. Soros is from a philosophical background. This book looks very abstract and boring, and it is not easy to understand as a whole. But there is a year-long trading experiment in the middle, which is very interesting and shocking. This experiment is to verify a theory put forward by himself, that is, reflexivity theory. Although he doesn't think it is very successful, the fund income has been very successful. The core of this book is also to introduce his own theory: reflexivity theory. His greatest dream is to become a man like Keynes and be able to create a theory, because he is very concerned about the economy, politics and society of all mankind, and he has a very strong desire to improve society. In reality, he is also a philanthropist, and his success in the financial market may only be a by-product of his ideas.

First of all, we look at his own definition of reflexivity from two angles. First, the cognitive defects of participants are innate, and there is a two-way connection between the defective cognition and the actual process of the event, which leads to the lack of correspondence between the two. He called this two-way connection reflexivity. The other is to define two functions first. The relationship between participants' thinking and the situations they participate in can be decomposed into two functional relationships. He called the participants' efforts to understand the situation as cognitive or passive function, and the influence of their thinking on the real world as participation or active function. When two functions work together, they will interfere with each other. Functions produce definite results on the premise of independent variables, but in this case, the independent variables of one function are the dependent variables of another function. The definite result no longer appears. What we see is an interaction, in which the situation and participants' views are dependent variables, so that an initial change will suddenly cause further changes in the situation and participants' views at the same time. He called this interaction "reflexivity". This definition is easy to understand. To give a simple example, for example, in the stock and futures markets, the emergence of a wave of common quotes is generally related to the corresponding fundamental background. The views and participation of investors or speculators on the market, in turn, strengthen the evolution of the market, so that this trend can continue until it reverses. The influence of realistic fundamentals and investors' participation on fundamentals and markets is interactive and mutually reinforcing. His concept may not be very new, but it has not been paid attention to by academic circles. Soros firmly attacked the concept of social science, which he thought was wrong in itself. Because they don't pay attention to the researcher's influence on the reflexivity of the research object, because the researcher is thoughtful and biased, the conclusion can't be as accurate as natural science, and deductive model or D-N model is not applicable in sociology. He also attacked the concept of equilibrium in economic theory. He believes that the financial order is not balanced, but unbalanced because of the prejudice of participants. That is, it has been in a state of deviation.

This book was written during the Reagan administration. At that time, the American economy was in a very glorious state. Soros defined it as the "Reagan Great Cycle", that is, a self-reinforcing process and a strong economy, a strong currency, a huge budget deficit and a huge trade deficit reinforce each other, creating economic growth without inflation. He called this circular connection the Reagan cycle. Because it attracts goods and capital from abroad to support a strong military posture. This is a series of characteristics of American economic performance during 1982 and 1985. Now some people even throw out the concept of "Trump Big Cycle", which is comparable to the Reagan Big Cycle at that time. During Reagan's tenure, the dollar index broke through 160, which is the highest point in history so far. As we all know, after the plaza agreement of 1985+00, the dollar began to fall. Soros's diachronic experiment in this book began in August 1985, just one month before the Plaza Agreement. At that time, he established a considerable number of long positions in yen and mark in the foreign exchange market. The Plaza Agreement catered to his theoretical framework and made him a fortune. Later, he predicted that the American securities market would enter a once-in-a-century bull market, and he increased his holdings of a large number of stock bulls. And accurately predict the plunge of crude oil and make a big profit from it. In nearly a year, his comprehensive rate of return in the stock, foreign exchange, bonds and crude oil markets exceeded 1 times. The book publishes the position change of quantum fund and the profit and loss of the fund every ten days and a half months. It can be seen that he is a very frequent heavy trader, and even often closes his position backhand. This trading technique stems from his in-depth understanding of macroeconomics and timely grasp of the impact of various meetings, data and events on different markets. However, as he himself said, many of his predictions are inaccurate, but this does not prevent him from achieving great success in the transaction. For a fund with a scale of several hundred million dollars, doubling it every year is very shocking. And it is said that Soros's Sharp ratio is higher than Buffett's. His inspiration for our trading is that when he feels that the situation is unfavorable, he is very determined to lighten his position, and when the situation is favorable, he dares to start with heavy positions. According to the change of the situation, he constantly adjusted his position, recorded his transactions, and made it clear that his thoughts were constantly improving. And I began to record every transaction myself, writing down the graphic and fundamental background at that time and my trading ideas, so as to constantly improve the transaction and adapt to the development of the market. Soros's operation is difficult for ordinary people to copy, which requires extremely high macro and micro knowledge reserves and deep insight into the situation. We know that the premise of technical analysis is that the market is always correct, but Soros thinks that the market is often incorrect. He is a trader who likes to hunt the bottom, claiming to be in front of the curve, which is difficult for ordinary talented investors to imitate.

As can be seen from the book, Soros is very diligent, modest and pragmatic, and successfully combines philosophy with practice. At the end of the book, he gave some advice to the world economy. One of them is very interesting. He suggested setting up a global central bank and issuing international currency to replace the reserve position of the US dollar. Although this idea has not been realized so far, it inevitably reminds people that the current cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Libra, which Facebook is about to launch, are at least international, although they do not meet Soros's definition of a stable international currency.