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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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."