This book will satisfy the demand among college majors in Finance and Financial Engineering, and mathematically-versed practitioners for description of both the classical approaches to equity investing and new investment strategies scattered in the periodic literature. Besides the major portfolio management theories (mean variance theory, CAPM, and APT), the book addresses several important topics: portfolio diversification, optimal ESG portfolios, factor models (smart betas), robust portfolio optimization, risk-based asset allocation, statistical arbitrage, alternative data based investing, back-testing of trading strategies, modern market microstructure, algorithmic trading, and agent-based modeling of financial markets. The book also includes the basic elements of time series analysis in the Appendix for self-contained presentation of the material. While the book covers technical concepts and models, it will not overburden the reader with math beyond the Finance undergraduates' curriculum.

From the author. Self-publishing writers should not have a problem with self-reviewing their books. There is a risk, of course, that this may end up with "self-reading." But let me try, anyway.

This is a memoir of a former Soviet physicist of Jewish descent who came to the USA as a tourist and became a financial quant. It's mostly an emigre story. It has some sad pages about my relatives who fled from Nazi Germany and landed in Gulag. My descendants won't find their roots on Ancestry.com; I've written this piece for them, too. This book is also a tale of a man who wanted to be a scientist and became one. Finally, there is a gallery of my failed relationships with a hopefully happy ending (I keep fingers crossed).

"Papa, your life is your work and yet you write mostly about women," my daughter said. There is some truth in her words and I put them in the epigraph.

"You appear to have had an inherently interesting life," one independent publisher acknowledged. She rejected my book anyway.

"Biographies don't sell unless you're a celebrity," another publisher informed me. Maybe; I'm not in the marketing business (you already know that). I've written this book after I started having flashes of my memory that didn't go away. I put them onto paper but they are still with me.

Thanks for reading.

" Alec Schmidt "

Cedar Knolls NJ, October 2012.