His share price is still off more than 40 percent from its highs, underperforming even the S&P 500. Oh, wow. I thought Lewis was in finance, but apparently he

His share price is still off more than 40 percent from its highs, underperforming even the S&P 500. Oh, wow. I thought Lewis was in finance, but apparently he doesn't realize that the peak-to-trough performance of one member of an average is very likely to be higher than the peak-to-trough performance of that average. This is true, even with a two-stock index: Year Stock A Stock B Avg. 0 10 12 11 1 12 10 11 2 5 5 5 Note that A and B both had a larger peak to trough loss than the average. And yet, the average consists of A and B. e railed against derivatives as weapons of mass destruction, and now turns out to have been sitting on a $68 billion pile of credit default swaps and exotic put options on various stock market indexes. He complains specifically about counterparty risk. Someone who read what he said would know that; someone who heard thirdhand quotes might not. The derivatives he holds don't have any counterparty risk for him, because he's getting all the cash up front and paying out based on future events.