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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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