What I Just Read

A strange book: think of the movie The Wolf of Wall Street , but instead of retail brokers on Long Island, it's the institutional bond syndicate desk at a major bank. But the pranks, the drugs and the ludicrous behavior are all the same.  Straight to Hell is crass, outlandish, instructive at certain points[*] and genuinely comedic at others--but I wish I hadn't read it. It's hard to tell what the author is trying to do exactly (moralize? satirize? shock? warn?), but ultimately the book leaves you with a gross feeling: for the author, for all the people in the story, and for yourself as the reader. For readers interested in this genre: stick to Michael Lewis' classic  Liar's Poker.   [*] Instructive, that is, if you're curious how an institutional sell-side bond house works; how bond issuance deals are won and lost; how major sell-side firms both compete and cooperate as they fight over deals; how these deals, once won, are then doled out to institutional invest...

After reading this book, you will think very differently about money: what it is, what it means, what kind of ethical framework should surround it, and why inflating the money supply is one of civilization's great moral and ethical failings. The author asserts, convincingly, that money can and should be private, competitive, not centralized, and  never  under the monopoly control of the state. The temptation to inflate (and thereby steal) is too great. Inflation is a feature, not a bug, of modern governments. It's one of the state's most powerful levers of power, both unseen and indirect--and therefore all the more effective. In the long run, inflation slowly but surely centralizes more and more wealth and power in the hands of the state by gradually extracting resources from the people, effectively handing them either directly to the government or to cantillon insiders within the government's power structure. It is an incredibly effective mechanism to centralize and ...

This was my first experience reading this author. Competent short stories, some very good.  The author has a knack for creating a mood and for creating an arc of tension and release. See for example the short story "Rain" where the reader really feels the smothering monsoon on the islands of Samoa, or see the story "P.&O." with its atmosphere of genuine foreboding as one of the main characters lies ill in a ship's sick bay, but then an expiation and release of that tension as the story's central character puts her own mind right about a past wrong done to her. Finally, an auxiliary benefit to readers: we get a well-fleshed out picture of the British Empire in the early 20th century. If we had to name this era, maybe we could call it "post-peak UK." It was a time of clear class distinctions, obvious-but-unwritten proprieties and competent English functionality worldwide: on transcontinental train trips, on multi-week steamer passages--wherever ...

Besser gut schlafen, als gut essen. [1] This is a book for intermediate (or higher) level investors--the type of investor who's lived through a major market cycle or two and wants a deeper understanding of investing's more abstract (though no less real) risks. If you're a beginner, most of this book will make little sense to you. But if you already have some experience under your belt, you will walk away from this book with a solid intuitive grasp of concepts like sequence of return risk, different types of tail risks, and making yourself "convex" rather than "concave" to different market scenarios. It's unfortunate, but these risks and ideas simply do not compute for people until they've lived through a substantial drawdown--something on the order of a 2008 GFC-grade decline in their capital. Unfortunately for me, I learn very slowly, so it took me my entire career as an investment analyst  plus the 2008 crisis plus reading all of Nassim Tale...

I've been indirectly exposed to this book many times over the years since so many personal development books draw from it. As a recent example, the books I read and reviewed last year on sports psychology (see  here , here and here ) all borrow from  Psycho-Cybernetics  in one way or another.  Guess it was time to tackle the real thing. This book's central idea is extremely useful: think of the human body as a servo-mechanism under your control, and then think of "you" (the combined entity of your mind/self plus your servo-mechanism) as an iterating, course-correcting "goal-seeking machine" designed for achievement, learning, growth and effort.  It's worth noting that the author is in no way saying we are robots. Robot don't have volition; we do. More importantly, our job as volitional, goal-seeking beings is to understand the ramifications of this volition: we have the ability to choose our goals, choose our targets--as well as choose how and to w...