I got a copy of Aaron Brown's latest book Red-Blooded Risk, which is kind of like My Life as a Quant by Derman, in that's it's a very personal account of how finance works. I think it's very useful for 50-somethings to write retrospectives like this, because otherwise it's written by people too far removed or too naive. For example Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker is now a classic, but he was a mere bond salesman for 3 years; while his anecdotes were interesting and well-told, his big take-aways...

A Northwestern grad student (just like I used to be) blogs on academic paper over at A Fine Theorem, and I was struck by this snippet:The benefit of capitalism can’t have much to do with profit incentives per se, since (almost) every employee of a modern firm is a not an owner, and hence is incentivized to work hard only by her labor contract. A government agency could conceivably use precisely the same set of contracts and get precisely the same outcome as the private firm (the principle-agent...

I was on the Chicago Tribune website, and the top banner ad contained the following picture links to a site promoting penny stocks. The link went to a site with those annoying pop-up ads that are difficult to destroy. I think a good investing rule, or at least guideline, is to not buy stocks promoted at websites with half-naked women. Another might be to avoid investments that present +1000% returns as examples (see here or here), which are often common on these sites. As mentioned, average...

I was at an NBER conference in early 2008 when we really didn’t know if we were in a recession, and Markus Brunnermeier explained to a group of esteemed economists that while the housing collapse was real, it represented only a couple hundred billion dollars, and by then the stock market seemed to have lost three times that, which seemed an overreaction, a sign of excessive volatility due to behavioral biases. This was not a contrary stance, rather, the conventional expert opinion. This turned...