Worthwhile reading for budding plutocrats and numerate investors alike.
Accessible if sometimes-turbulent portrait of “arguably the most successful trader in the history of modern finance.”
James Simons, a math professor, founded Renaissance Technologies in 1982 and has since leveraged a battery of other mathematicians and machines to earn more than $7 billion per year in market gains—a sum that, Wall Street Journal writer Zuckerman (The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters, 2013, etc.) notes, is greater than the annual revenue of Levi Strauss and Hyatt Hotels. The firm does this with a staff that’s markedly smaller than the usual investment house, all of them “quants” devoted to a scientific approach to playing the market. Whereas investors such as Warren Buffett followed a “value” strategy that, as the textbooks have it, “recommended buying when prices cheapened and taking money off the table when prices richened,” Simons—who had earned his wings developing algorithms to break Soviet codes in the Cold War—followed trends closely, amassing historical price information and hiring people devoted to “foraging and cleaning data the rest of the world cared little about." Data can be cooked, of course; Zuckerman writes that Simons was impressed by the figures a rising investment manager named Bernard Madoff was posting, though he pulled his funds when he came to suspect them well before Madoff’s vast Ponzi scheme was exposed. Simons’ devotion to numbers and algorithms did not rule out gut instincts, as with the near-ruinous market crash of 1987, though, as Zuckerman notes, the quants did better than their nonquant counterparts—one reason why the quants now rule the market. Of more than passing interest are the liberal Simons’ dealings with partner Robert Mercer, who applied quant methods to politics and came up with the likes of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, a decision that brought enough heat on the house to force Mercer’s resignation.
Worthwhile reading for budding plutocrats and numerate investors alike.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1798-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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