Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles

There were some aspects of this book I really loved.  The inventive description of Martian life and its objects was one.  Another was the hilarious way the self-important early arrivals from Earth are treated.  Namely, shot and locked up in a lunatic asylum!  Even though it was published in 1950, it still felt modern and many of the themes remain pertinent.

This book makes interesting, and sometimes unusual, commentary on subjects like science and technology, militarism, colonialism and the qualities of mysticism and materialism.  Being too young to remember the 50s and not being that well informed about that decade, I can imagine the book was perhaps more poignant in a contemporary context.  Historical facts like America’s great prosperity after the Second World War, its emergence as the dominant global superpower and the invention of the atomic bomb are all difficult to interpret from such a distance.  However, it was of note to me that it was written a full decade before a man went to space.  I got the impression that the book’s commentary on contemporary 1950s America was a bit lost on me, but that didn’t spoil my enjoyment of it.  Another unsubstantiated feeling I had was that its weirdness and otherworldliness was diminished as the genre of ‘science fiction’ became more and more popular, but I have no way of knowing this with any certainty.

One gripe I had about the book was its essential lack of narrative.  It reads like a collection of short stories or essays united by a Martian theme.  I wasn’t able to easily follow the fate of one character, unless they die, and very few of the characters recur in an identifiable way.  For example, the wonderful mixture of intergalactic and domestic themes in ‘Ylla’ left me wondering about the fates of Mr & Mrs K, but they only reappear obliquely.  On the other hand, these unexplained and unresolved aspects of the book do lend it a mystical quality that’s hard to apprehend directly.

I liked this book and would definitely recommend it.  I enjoyed reading it even though I’m sure quite a lot of its cultural commentary went over my head.  My complaint is that it lacks unity and cohesion but neither of these prove fatal to its success.

Ben Mezrich - Bringing The House Down

I’d heard of this book many times because it’s cited as the inspiration for the film ‘21’.  It’s such an amusing and incongruous story of MIT maths wizards posing as high rollers and trying to outsmart mafioso casino bosses, it would be a shame if it hadn’t.  Beyond being about and describing an incredibly good story, I didn’t find that much to enjoy in the book.

Some of my disappointment might have come from the context in which I read it.  Having just finished ‘A Man for All Markets’ by Edward Thorp, I thought ‘Bringing The House Down’ would make a good follow up.  Especially given that I've been meaning to read it for more than a decade.  In reading Thorp’s autobiography, I had basically heard an earlier version of the same story.  This made most of the blackjack background and other explanatory sections in this book redundant.  It was also difficult to tell if these sections were helpful and clear because I already knew the material and couldn’t be impartial.  On the whole, I preferred the style and content of Thorp’s account.  Much of the same material is covered but Thorp’s is more matter of fact and he goes into more detail on the technical aspects of his systems.  Clearly, they’re very different types of book but it undoubtedly affected my reading of this book. 

 

The author uses various styles of writing at different points through the book.  In some he narrates the lives of the protagonists rather than profiling them and this has the effect of making it read more like a screenplay.  I haven’t seen the film but these sections of the book had an ambience of over-emphasis and breathless exaggeration.  I would’ve preferred less dialogue, which is always tricky to get right.  The author has clearly done his homework and the background information for the characters is strong.  This made me wish for more of this type of material.  I infinitely preferred the well researched backstories to the central casting descriptions of the Las Vegas high life accompanied by a similarly stock script.  Some sections are written in the first person when he meets people from the story for interviews after the event.  These tended to have a journalist tone to them.  I also had the suspicion that the story had been cleaned up a lot for public consumption but this is to be expected.  The presentation of Vegas and the gambling world was seedy, but in a very Hollywood way.  Perhaps the author wisely had an eye to future film rights when he was writing it or, more plausibly in my eyes, the protagonists wanted a more family friendly version!

For such a famous and high selling book, I was a bit surprised the writing wasn’t better.  It’s extremely easy to read, which is probably the most important factor for a best seller.  Nonetheless, some of the writing was clunky.  The sentence, ‘His family tree was made up of so many different races, you needed a pie chart to buy him a birthday present.’ (p17)  magnificently muddles the imagery of pies and trees.  It also made me wonder how many people are giving birthday gifts based on ancestral ethnicity and, if there are any weirdos like this, how many of them are using pie charts to help with the more complex cases?! I thought it was an absurdly bad sentence.

Perhaps I’ve been a bit harsh on this book. It gives a good general explanation of the field, narrates a wonderfully entertaining story and ultimately presents a lot of background and material in a highly readable 300 odd pages.  However, perhaps reading a book I enjoyed more about the same subject directly before reading this one has made me unduly harsh!  I would certainly recommend this book because it’s a good story but I didn’t think it was an especially good book.

Edward Thorp - A Man For All Markets

 I really enjoyed this book and felt that, given his achievements, Edward Thorp could be a lot more famous if he wanted to be.  Born into a poor family during the depths of the Great Depression, his experiences of childhood privation stayed with him; as did a fascination with numbers and empirical research.  His father had to leave university after a year or so for lack of funds and was always keen that his son get more education than he could.  The young Thorp seems obsessed with finding out how things around him worked and conducting his own scientific research, initially mainly in Chemistry.  This hunger for knowledge and understanding reminded me of the famous physicist Richard Feyneman but this was a far better book than ‘You Must Be Joking Mr. Feyneman’, which was insufferable.

Thorp’s interest in probability led him to develop a system for ‘counting cards’ at Blackjack, which allowed him to beat the casinos.  He then went on to develop ‘the world’s first wearable computer’ to help predict where the ball will land in roulette.  Following these investigations into casino games, Thorp turned his attention to the stock market and options trading.  Using mathematical models and arbitrage, Thorp’s hedge fund was at the leading edge of quantitative investment and options pricing theory between 1969-1988.  Returns averaged between 15-19% vs. 10% for the S&P 500 and the funds never had a down year even while the S&P 500 experienced three over the same period.  The funds also never had a down quarter, which is remarkable.

There were a few things that struck me as unusual about Thorp and the book.  One is that he seems to value a balance between his work and the other parts of his life.   Many successful people don’t seem to know when to stop, which could explain why they’re so successful.  Thorp, on the other hand, doesn’t seem interested in exploiting his blackjack strategy to the fullest financial extent and even writes a book to let everyone else know about it.  Equally, he publishes his option trading strategies (admittedly only some!)  in academic papers while running his hedge fund and also shuts it down in spite of its success and popularity.  It seems common for rich people, especially in finance, to claim that they’re not really in it for money and that they do it for the intellectual stimulation.  This usually strikes me as rubbish because most people in finance aren’t doing anything particularly intellectual and if they really didn’t care about money they could work in academia.  In Thorp’s case, he truly was intellectual and he worked in academia before, during and after the success of his hedge fund.

Another aspect of the book I enjoyed is Thorp’s irreverence for the other big wigs he mentions.  He more or less accuses Richard Feyneman of lying to him about his knowledge of research into blackjack strategies when they meet early in his career.  He also paints a wonderful picture of Warren Buffett as an extreme cheapskate, which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given his style of investment.  Thorp meets Buffett early in his career and makes lots of money investing with him in spite of their different investment styles.  Normally, this would set the stage for lots of gushing praise, and there is some of that, but Thorp also points out how Buffett charges $8 for a photo with a cardboard cutout of him during Berkshire Hathaway’s AGM and how the ‘shareholder special steak dinner’ at Buffett’s favourite restaurant costs $21 during the AGM when it is normally $18!  A less amusing incident related in the book is how Thorp was suspicious of the regularity of returns at Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund and did some preliminary research into it by checking the trades the fund reported against transactions recorded by the exchange.  He discovered his dealing history was fictitious but was roundly ignored by the supposedly sophisticated investors he informed.  This was in 1991, a decade before another whistle blower tried to inform the SEC in 2001 and was also ignored.  Sadly, this is just one more example in a long history of regulatory bodies all over the world doing the exact opposite of their job (cf. SEC & FSA / GFC, BaFin / Wirecard to name two recent examples).

Perhaps the most suspicious part of the book is the episode where six partners at his hedge fund (PNP) are investigated with securities fraud and threatened with RICO charges in the late 80s before the fund was closed.  Thorp presents himself as an honest person and his statistical methods for trading should’ve prevented any interest in using nefarious practices.  However, his fellow managing partner in NY, James Regan, and five others seem to have conspired with Drexel Burnham to create fake losses to reduce their tax bill.  Thorp was never accused of any wrongdoing and the five partners convicted eventually had their judgements overturned.  In Thorp’s telling, Rudy Giuliani, US Attorney in Manhattan at the time, was desperate to nail Mike Milken, the junk bond innovator, because he had upset too many establishment figures by facilitating hostile takeovers.  To this end, Giuliani used the unprecedented threat of RICO charges against PNP partners and employees to try to get them to rat on Milken.  Some of this has a ring of truth to it.  However, Thorp is also very quick to explain that all of the charges related to people in the NY office where, he writes, the office operated with a very different ‘culture’.  This sounds a lot like someone trying to distance himself from the bad behaviour of other employees.  It also doesn’t inspire much confidence that the highly successful fund then closed.  I suspect the charges were a bit trumped up and it is undeniable they came with a highly unusual threat of extremely long sentences allowed by connecting the crimes to the RICO Act.  However, it also seems fairly obvious that Thorp’s partner was up to no good and that the two might have had a major falling out after this.  Thorp certainly doesn't make any effort to exonerate anyone from NY except by saying, more generally, that he thought the whole thing was motivated by a Mike Milken witch hunt.  Regan, his partner and the highest ranking miscreant, is scarcely ever mentioned.  Undoubtedly there’s more to the story than what’s in the book!

It’s inevitable that someone who’s had as much success as Thorp is going to be pretty pleased with themself.  However, overall I felt the book wasn’t too self-congratulatory.  He’s achieved some amazing stuff in his life and hasn’t made it his job to publicise this (cf. Buffett, Dalio).  Obviously, writing books isn’t exactly hiding your light under a bushel but it’s fair to say two of these (‘Beat the Dealer’ and ‘Beat the Market’) were designed to help other people.  Even if the advice of the second one was a bit after the fact and seemingly not as applicable as the first.  It’s not a spectacularly well written book and the author has some odd habits, like sometimes writing ‘I and my brother’ or ‘I and my wife’ as opposed to doing it the other way round, which he sometimes does.  Initially , I thought this was a sign of deep seated egotism but by the end I didn’t see Thorp as an especially self-centered person.  He is effusive in his praise for some of his former colleagues (NB - not Regan!), his academic collaborators and, especially, his wife.  Thorp is obviously a voracious reader, although not as prolific as his wife, and the book references lots of interesting articles, books and authors.  This aspect is made even more helpful by the fact the book has truly excellent notes and a good index, which spoke to me of a thorough and meticulous mind.  I probably would have preferred it if numbered footnotes were included in the main body of the text but this is a minor complaint.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and felt it was a good mixture of stories from his life and advice about how he thinks and approaches problems.  He is without doubt a fascinating character and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to anyone with an interest in probability or investment as he is a master of understanding both subjects.