Weekend listening/reading

Ed Thorp is best known to the world at large as the author of Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One (1966). He then took his skills to Wall Street and became one of the earliest quants. His story is among those told in Scott Patterson’s new book The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It. I haven’t read the book, but Terry Gross interviewed both Thorp and Patterson recently on her NPR program Fresh Air. "The Quants": It Pays to Know Your Wall Street Math runs about half an hour. It’s definitely worth a listen; it doesn’t tax the brain. Also note that on the page I’ve linked to there is an excerpt from the book.

If you’ve never read 18 Trading Champions Share Their Keys to Top Trading Profits (1996) it’s available for free download on Scribd. The book is very short—one page per trader. But it features many of the best-known technical traders, among them George Angell, Walter Bressert, Tom DeMark, Cynthia Kase, George Lane, Linda Bradford Raschke, and Larry Williams.

From Advisor Perspectives comes a little piece by Tom Brakke entitled “Thinking about Doing.” It expands on a statement by Ryan St. Onge, the freestyle aerialist, in a recent New York Times article: “I probably spend 80 percent of my time thinking about it, and 20 percent doing it.”

Finally, speaking of The New York Times, here’s another science section article “Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally” that may not have obvious connections to trading, but then again who knows?