A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market

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A Man for All Markets — Beating Blackjack Edward O. Thorp, A Man for All Markets — Beating Blackjack

I’ve got something the billionaire could never have. The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” -Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, to Kurt Vonnegut at a billionaire’s party. But this is a good book. See, I read "A mind at play", a biography about Claude Shannon (btw they are genius bros), and I dragged myself to finish it. It is hard to write about a genius, if you are not a genius yourself (the author of "A mind at play" admitted it himself). This one, I cannot stop reading.Following up on his success at twenty-one, Thorp, along with Claude Shannon, designed and built a mechanical and electrical device that allowed them to gain an advantage in roulette by predicting with some proficiency approximately where the bouncing ball would end up. That was quite a coup especially considering that it happened fifty-some years ago. It takes just a few minutes to sign up, and then you’ll immediately start earning 4.8% interest on your savings. And when you open an account today, you’ll get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more. Visit Wealthfront.com/Tim to get started. Ed Thorp is a genius and will one day be recognized, officially, as one of the greatest minds of the 20th (and early 21st) century. On the crisis in funding for the California university system: “To starve education is to eat our seed corn. No tax today, no technology tomorrow.” (p. 341) You dont have to take my words for it. Mr.Taleb himself endorsed this book. So it must be something.

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp | Waterstones

Thereafter, Thorp shifted his sights to "the biggest casino in the world" Wall Street. Devising and then deploying mathematical formulas to beat the market, Thorp ushered in the era of quantitative finance we live in today. Along the way, the so-called godfather of the quants played bridge with Warren Buffett, crossed swords with a young Rudy Giuliani, detected the Bernie Madoff scheme, and, to beat the game of roulette, invented, with Claude Shannon, the world's first wearable computer. The book is a great educational experience and a great narrative. I came away with a much better understanding of how hedge funds work which probably would have been boring or annoying in a lesser told tale. There are learnings and scattered through their are anecdotes. For instance, he tells a story about how he convinced his maid to put her money into Berkshire Hathaway in the 1960s and keep it there. She didn't keep it there. For all of his chest puffery, I honestly don't see how Mr. Thorpe benefits society. He exploited loopholes. Not super admirable. He seems to have had a nice life and cared very much about family and friends. While I certainly appreciate that aspect of his life and career, it's not special enough to warrant such a long and rambling autobiography. Here, for the first time, Thorp tells the story of what he did, how he did it, his passions and motivations, and the curiosity that has always driven him to disregard conventional wisdom and devise game-changing solutions to seemingly insoluble problems. An intellectual thrill ride, replete with practical wisdom that can guide us all in uncertain financial waters, A Man for All Markets is an instant classic—a book that challenges its readers to think logically about a seemingly irrational world. What was it about Warren Buffett that made Edward come away from their first meeting convinced he’d someday be the richest man in the world? [34:22]

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.