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
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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