Thorp’s in-the-trenches account of gaming the system(s) is a pleasure—and instructive, too.
You can’t time the market, and you can’t beat the house. Right? Wrong.
What makes a good investor? To gauge from this amiable account by math whiz, professor, gambler, hedge fund manager, and investor Thorp (The Mathematics of Gambling, 1984, etc.)—one of the early “quants,” as brokers call number nerds—much hinges on being curious and being willing to do the work necessary to satisfy that curiosity. In his case, there’s also a contrarian streak at play; told, like all of us, that the winning odds are always with the casino and that there’s no way to reliably play against the house, he took the scientific approach and tested the assertion. “I formed the habit of taking the result of pure thought—such as a formula for valuing warrants—and using it profitably,” he writes. And did he ever. Blessed with a bent for understanding complex mathematics and being able to do sums in his head (a lost art, he assures us, that just about anyone can master), he first went to Las Vegas as a kind of validating experiment to confirm the suspicion that a deck of cards “that isn’t well shuffled may have predictable patterns that can be exploited.” Discovering those patterns is the rub, and Thorp’s abilities outshine those of most mortals, which would seem to be true of his power to read a futures contract and a balance sheet. His account of making a broker blanch with a daring hedge maneuver during the height of the October 1987 crash is an exercise in learned derring-do, with the upshot that while the S&P dropped by a quarter, he at least broke even during the worst of it and gained in the long term. It’s the kind of thing any would-be investor, to say nothing of casino cowboy, ought to read.
Thorp’s in-the-trenches account of gaming the system(s) is a pleasure—and instructive, too.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6796-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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