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
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
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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