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For fans of The Black Swan and written by a veteran Wall Street
Journal reporter, this is a fascinating deep dive into the world of
billion-dollar traders and high-stakes crisis predictors who strive
to turn extreme events into financial windfalls. There’s no doubt
that our world has gotten more extreme. Pandemics, climate change,
superpower rivalries, technological disruption, political
radicalisation, religious fundamentalism — all threaten chaos
that put trillions in assets at risk. But around the world, across
a wide variety of disciplines, would-be super-forecasters are
trying to take the guesswork out of what formerly seemed like
random chance. Some put their faith in ‘black swans’ —
unpredictable, catastrophic events that can’t be foreseen but
send exotic financial instruments screaming in high-profit
directions. Most famous among this group of big-bet traders are
those who run the Universa fund, who, on days of extreme upheaval,
have made as much as $1 billion. Author Scott Patterson gained
exclusive access to Universa strategists and met with savvy seers
in a variety of fields, from earthquake prediction to
counterterrorism to climatology, to see if it’s actually possible
to bet on disaster — and win. Riveting, relevant, and revelatory,
this is a must-read for anyone curious about how some of today’s
investors alchemise catastrophe into profit.
"Beware of geeks bearing formulas."
--Warren Buffett
In March of 2006, the world's richest men sipped champagne in an
opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker
tournament with million-dollar stakes, but those numbers meant
nothing to them. They were accustomed to risking "billions."
At the card table that night was Peter Muller, an eccentric,
whip-smart whiz kid who'd studied theoretical mathematics at
Princeton and now managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called
PDT...when he wasn't playing his keyboard for morning commuters on
the New York subway. With him was Ken Griffin, who as an
undergraduate trading convertible bonds out of his Harvard dorm
room had outsmarted the Wall Street pros and made money in one of
the worst bear markets of all time. Now he was the tough-as-nails
head of Citadel Investment Group, one of the most powerful money
machines on earth. There too were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued,
mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR, a man as famous for his
computer-smashing rages as for his brilliance, and Boaz Weinstein,
chess life-master and king of the credit default swap, who while
juggling $30 billion worth of positions for Deutsche Bank found
time for frequent visits to Las Vegas with the famed MIT
card-counting team.
On that night in 2006, these four men and their cohorts were the
new kings of Wall Street. Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein
were among the best and brightest of a new breed, the "quants."
Over the prior twenty years, this species of math whiz
--technocrats who make billions not with gut calls or fundamental
analysis but with formulas and high-speed computers-- had usurped
the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk-takers who'd long
been the alpha males the world's largest casino. The quants
believed that a dizzying, indecipherable-to-mere-mortals cocktail
of differential calculus, quantum physics, and advanced geometry
held the key to reaping riches from the financial markets. And they
helped create a digitized money-trading machine that could shift
billions around the globe with the click of a mouse.
Few realized that night, though, that in creating this
unprecedented machine, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness and
Weinstein had sowed the seeds for history's greatest financial
disaster.
Drawing on unprecedented access to these four number-crunching
titans, "The Quants "tells the inside story of what they thought
and felt in the days and weeks when they helplessly watched much of
their net worth vaporize - and wondered just how their mind-bending
formulas and genius-level IQ's had led them so wrong, so fast. Had
their years of success been dumb luck, fool's gold, a good run that
could come to an end on any given day? What if The Truth they
sought -- the secret of the markets -- wasn't knowable? Worse, what
if there wasn't any Truth?
In "The Quants," Scott Patterson tells the story not just of these
men, but of Jim Simons, the reclusive founder of the most
successful hedge fund in history; Aaron Brown, the quant who used
his math skills to humiliate Wall Street's old guard at their
trademark game of Liar's Poker, and years later found himself with
a front-row seat to the rapid emergence of mortgage-backed
securities; and gadflies and dissenters such as Paul Wilmott,
Nassim Taleb, and Benoit Mandelbrot.
With the immediacy of today's NASDAQ close and the timeless power
of a Greek tragedy, "The Quants" is at once a masterpiece of
explanatory journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and
hubris...and an ominous warning about Wall Street's future.
"From the Hardcover edition."
A news-breaking account of the global stock market's subterranean
battles, "Dark Pools" portrays the rise of the "bots"- artificially
intelligent systems that execute trades in milliseconds and use the
cover of darkness to out-maneuver the humans who've created them.
In the beginning was Josh Levine, an idealistic programming genius
who dreamed of wresting control of the market from the big
exchanges that, again and again, gave the giant institutions an
advantage over the little guy. Levine created a computerized
trading hub named Island where small traders swapped stocks, and
over time his invention morphed into a global electronic stock
market that sent trillions in capital through a vast jungle of
fiber-optic cables.
By then, the market that Levine had sought to fix had turned upside
down, birthing secretive exchanges called dark pools and a new
species of trading machines that could think, and that seemed,
ominously, to be slipping the control of their human masters.
Dark Pools is the fascinating story of how global markets have been
hijacked by trading robots--many so self-directed that humans can't
predict what they'll do next.
Build, deploy, test, and run cloud-native serverless applications
using AWS Lambda and other popular AWS services Key Features Learn
how to write, run, and deploy serverless applications in Amazon Web
Services Make the most of AWS Lambda functions to build scalable
and cost-efficient systems Build and deploy serverless applications
with Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda functions Book
DescriptionServerless computing is a way to run your code without
having to provision or manage servers. Amazon Web Services provides
serverless services that you can use to build and deploy
cloud-native applications. Starting with the basics of AWS Lambda,
this book takes you through combining Lambda with other services
from AWS, such as Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon
Step Functions. You'll learn how to write, run, and test Lambda
functions using examples in Node.js, Java, Python, and C# before
you move on to developing and deploying serverless APIs efficiently
using the Serverless Framework. In the concluding chapters, you'll
discover tips and best practices for leveraging Serverless
Framework to increase your development productivity. By the end of
this book, you'll have become well-versed in building, securing,
and running serverless applications using Amazon API Gateway and
AWS Lambda without having to manage any servers. What you will
learn Understand the core concepts of serverless computing in AWS
Create your own AWS Lambda functions and build serverless APIs
using Amazon API Gateway Explore best practices for developing
serverless applications at scale using Serverless Framework
Discover the DevOps patterns in a modern CI/CD pipeline with AWS
CodePipeline Build serverless data processing jobs to extract,
transform, and load data Enforce resource tagging policies with
continuous compliance and AWS Config Create chatbots with natural
language understanding to perform automated tasks Who this book is
forThis AWS book is for cloud architects and developers who want to
build and deploy serverless applications using AWS Lambda. A basic
understanding of AWS is required to get the most out of this book.
"Beware of geeks bearing formulas."
--Warren Buffett
In March of 2006, the world's richest men sipped champagne in an
opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker
tournament with million-dollar stakes, but those numbers meant
nothing to them. They were accustomed to risking "billions."
At the card table that night was Peter Muller, an eccentric,
whip-smart whiz kid who'd studied theoretical mathematics at
Princeton and now managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called
PDT...when he wasn't playing his keyboard for morning commuters on
the New York subway. With him was Ken Griffin, who as an
undergraduate trading convertible bonds out of his Harvard dorm
room had outsmarted the Wall Street pros and made money in one of
the worst bear markets of all time. Now he was the tough-as-nails
head of Citadel Investment Group, one of the most powerful money
machines on earth. There too were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued,
mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR, a man as famous for his
computer-smashing rages as for his brilliance, and Boaz Weinstein,
chess life-master and king of the credit default swap, who while
juggling $30 billion worth of positions for Deutsche Bank found
time for frequent visits to Las Vegas with the famed MIT
card-counting team.
On that night in 2006, these four men and their cohorts were the
new kings of Wall Street. Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein
were among the best and brightest of a new breed, the "quants".
Over the prior twenty years, this species of math whiz
--technocrats who make billions not with gut calls or fundamental
analysis but with formulas and high-speed computers-- had usurped
the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk-takers who'd long
been the alpha males the world's largest casino. The quants
believed that a dizzying, indecipherable-to-mere-mortals cocktail
of differential calculus, quantum physics, and advanced geometry
held the key to reaping riches from the financial markets. And they
helped create a digitized money-trading machine that could shift
billions around the globe with the click of a mouse.
Few realized that night, though, that in creating this
unprecedented machine, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness and
Weinstein had sowed the seeds for history's greatest financial
disaster.
Drawing on unprecedented access to these four number-crunching
titans, "The Quants "tells the inside story of what they thought
and felt in the days and weeks when they helplessly watched much of
their net worth vaporize - and wondered just how their mind-bending
formulas and genius-level IQ's had led them so wrong, so fast. Had
their years of success been dumb luck, fool's gold, a good run that
could come to an end on any given day? What if The Truth they
sought -- the secret of the markets -- wasn't knowable? Worse, what
if there wasn't any Truth?
In "The Quants", Scott Patterson tells the story not just of these
men, but of Jim Simons, the reclusive founder of the most
successful hedge fund in history; Aaron Brown, the quant who used
his math skills to humiliate Wall Street's old guard at their
trademark game of Liar's Poker, and years later found himself with
a front-row seat to the rapid emergence of mortgage-backed
securities; and gadflies and dissenters such as Paul Wilmott,
Nassim Taleb, and Benoit Mandelbrot.
With the immediacy of today's NASDAQ close and the timeless power
of a Greek tragedy, "The Quants" is at once a masterpiece of
explanatory journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and
hubris...and an ominous warning about Wall Street's future.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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Deccan (Paperback)
Scott Patterson
|
R520
Discovery Miles 5 200
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Jeb, Billie Sue, The Chief and everyone's favorite moonshining
pilots are back, this time to fight the invasion of Earth with time
out for an intergalactic competitive eating event and a quick trip
to Andromeda in a PortaPotty.
Join Shaklee and Amway, two enterprising aliens hell-bent on
selling moonshine to the outer worlds. Towed into low Earth orbit,
their penniless campaign immediately collides with human ambition
and downhome hillbilly charm.Chief among their opposition is the
new president-elect, a genuine backwoods Tennessee boy aided by his
girlfriend from the stars. It's a silly, improbable tale of human
folly and extraterrestrial nonsense.
What happens when the Governor of Tennessee is replaced by an alien
with presidential aspirations? It's the 2016 election, and there
are "some folks in town" with high ambitions, and low budgets. Join
a backwoods good old boy, and his new off-world girlfriend as they
crisscross time and space only to find themselves back where they
began, if only to know it for the first time. Spend a few hours
visiting intergalactic tractor-pulls, traveling in PortaPotty space
vehicles, and learning about multi-level marketing schemes done on
a grand and tawdry scale. It's a ridiculous book filled with silly
characters, and a barrel of laughs.
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Lumina (Paperback)
Scott Patterson
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R459
Discovery Miles 4 590
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
Dress left with Screech, the simian button-man, and assorted cyber
life forms as they sunder Mankind and run amok from low Earth
orbit. Romance, gambling, evolution of belief systems, and
ridiculous felonies fill this wayward novel like so many
ill-programmed Robots in search of the perfect high, and
personality upgrades.
At the end of the First World War, there were 270,000 demobilised Australian soldiers in Europe. Getting them home after the Armistice was a task of epic proportions that would take more than two years. In the meantime, how to keep these disgruntled, damaged men with guns occupied? In a word: sport. The Oarsmen tells the story of the servicemen who survived the war to row for the coveted King's Cup at the 1919 Royal Henley Peace Regatta. Competing against crews from the US, New Zealand, France, the UK and Canada, the Australians were a ragtag bunch of oarsmen thrown in an old-fashioned boat and expected to race. Many had seen the worst of the action during the war at Gallipoli and the Western Front, and carried scars both physical and psychological. The baggage they brought to the boat would soon threaten to capsize the whole endeavour. Combining first-hand accounts with lively prose, this never-before-told story approaches the First World War from peacetime and illuminates history in vivid and compelling detail. Interweaving the soldiers' personal stories from before, during and after the war, The Oarsmen paints a fascinating picture of how these men, and society, transitioned from an unprecedented war to a new sort of peace.
Dark Pools is the pacy, revealing, and profoundly chilling tale of
how global markets have been hijacked by trading robots - many so
self-directed that humans can't predict what they'll do next.It's
the story of the blisteringly intelligent computer programmers
behind the rise of these 'bots'. And it's a timely warning that as
artificial intelligence gradually takes over, we could be on the
verge of global meltdown. 'Scott Patterson has the ability to see
things you and I don't notice.' Nassim Nicholas Taleb, New York
Times bestselling author of Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness and
The Black Swan
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