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Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street Paperback – Illustrated, September 19, 2006
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In 1956 two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein's. The other was John L. Kelly Jr., a Texas-born, gun-toting physicist. Together they applied the science of information theory―the basis of computers and the Internet―to the problem of making as much money as possible, as fast as possible.
Shannon and MIT mathematician Edward O. Thorp took the "Kelly formula" to Las Vegas. It worked. They realized that there was even more money to be made in the stock market. Thorp used the Kelly system with his phenomenally successful hedge fund, Princeton-Newport Partners. Shannon became a successful investor, too, topping even Warren Buffett's rate of return. Fortune's Formula traces how the Kelly formula sparked controversy even as it made fortunes at racetracks, casinos, and trading desks. It reveals the dark side of this alluring scheme, which is founded on exploiting an insider's edge.
Shannon believed it was possible for a smart investor to beat the market―and William Poundstone's Fortune's Formula will convince you that he was right.
- Print length386 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHill and Wang
- Publication dateSeptember 19, 2006
- Dimensions5.4 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-109780809045990
- ISBN-13978-0809045990
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Seldom have true crime and smart math been blended together so engagingly.” ―The Wall Street Journal
“An amazing story that gives a big idea the needed star treatment . . . Fortune's Formula will appeal to readers of such books as Peter L. Bernstein's Against the Gods, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, and Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed. All try to explain why smart people take stupid risks. Poundstone goes them one better by showing how hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, for one, could have avoided disaster by following the Kelly method.” ―Business Week (four stars)
“'Fortune's Formula' may be the world's first history book, gambling primer, mathematics text, economics manual, personal finance guide and joke book in a single volume. Poundstone comes across as the best college professor you ever hand, someone who can turn almost any technical topic into an entertaining and zesty lecture.” ―The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Fortune's Formula
The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall StreetBy William PoundstoneHill & Wang
Copyright ©2006 William PoundstoneAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780809045990
Prologue
The Wire ServiceThe story starts with a corrupt telegraph operator. His name was John Payne, and he worked for Western Union's Cincinnati office in the early 1900s. At the urging of one of its largest stockholders, Western Union took a moral stand against the evils of gambling. It adopted a policy of refusing to transmit messages reporting horse race results. Payne quit his job and started his own Payne Telegraph Service of Cincinnati. The new service's sole purpose was to report racetrack results to bookies.
Payne stationed an employee at the local racetrack. The instant a horse crossed the finish line, the employee used a hand mirror to flash the winner, in code, to another employee in a nearby tall building. This employee telegraphed the results to pool halls all over Cincinnation leased wires.
In our age of omnipresent live sports coverage, the value of Payne's service may not be apparent. Without the telegraphed results, it could take minutes for news of winning horses to reach bookies. All sorts of shifty practices exploited this delay. A customer who learned the winner before the bookmakers did could place bets on a horse that had already won.
Payne's service ensured that the bookies had the advantage. When a customer tried to place a bet on a horse that had already won, the bookie would know it and refuse the bet. When a bettor unknowingly tried to place a bet on a horse that had already lost ... naturally, the bookie accepted that bet.
It is the American dream to invent a useful new product or service that makes a fortune. Within a few years, the Payne wire service was reporting results for tracks from Saratoga to the Midwest. Local crackdowns on gambling only boosted business. "It is my intention to witness the sport of kings without the vice of kings," decreed Chicago mayor Carter Harrison II, who banned all racetrack betting in the city Track attendance plummeted, and illegal bookmaking flourished.
In 1907 a particularly violent Chicago gangster named Mont Tennes acquired the Illinois franchise for Payne's wire service. Tennes discreetly named his own operation the General News Bureau. The franchise cost Tennes $300 a day He made that back many times over. There were more than seven hundred bookie joints in Chicago alone, and Tennes demanded that Illinois bookies pay him half their daily receipts.
Those profits were the envy of other Chicago gangsters. In July through September of 1907, six bombs exploded at Tennes's home or places of business. Tennes survived every one of the blasts. The reporter who informed Tennes of the sixth bomb asked whether he had any idea who was behind it. "Yes, of course I do," Tennes answered, "but I am not going to tell anyone about it, am I? That would be poor for business."
Tennes eventually decided he didn't need Payne and squeezed him out of business. Tennes's General News Bureau expanded south to New Orleans and west to San Francisco.
This prosperity drew the attention of federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. In 1916 Judge Landis launched a probe into General News Bureau. Clarence Darrow represented Tennes. He advised his client to take the Fifth Amendment. Judge Landis ultimately ruled that a federal judge had no jurisdiction over local antigambling statutes.
In 1927 Tennes decided it was time to retire. He issued 100 shares of stock in General News Bureau and sold them all. Tennes died peacefully in 1941. He bequeathed part of his fortune to Camp Honor, a character-building summer camp for wayward boys.
General News Bureau's largest stockholder, of 48 shares, was Moses ("Moe") Annenberg, publisher of the Racing Form. Annenberg was unapologetic about the social benefits of quick and accurate race results. "If people wager at a racetrack why should they be deprived of the right to do so away from a track?" he asked. "How many people can take time off from their jobs to go to a track?"
Annenberg hired a crony named James Ragan to run the wire service. By that time, there were scores of competitors. Annenberg and Ragan expanded by buying up the smaller wire services or running them out or business.
One man with the guts to stand up to Annenberg and Ragan was Irving WexSer, a bootlegger and owner of the Greater New York News Service. After Ragan started a price war with Greater New York News, Wexler sent a team of thugs to vandalize Annenberg's New York headquarters.
Annenberg knew that Wexler was tapping into General News's lines to get race results. It was cheaper than paying his own employees to report from each racetrack. So one day Annenberg delayed the race results on the portion of line that Wexler was tapping, Annenberg had the timely results phoned to a bunch of his own men, who placed big bets on the winning horses with Wexler's subscribers. Wexler's bookies, getting the delayed results, did not know that the horses had already won. By day's end, they had suffered crippling losses.
Annenberg's men went to each of Wexler's subscribers and explained what had happened. They refunded the day's losses, advising the bookies that it would be wise to switch to General News Bureau.
With such tactics, Annenberg's service-also known as "the Trust" or "the Wire"- expanded coast-to-coast, to Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. In 1934 Annenberg ditched his partners much as Tennes had done. Annenberg established a new, rival wire service called Nationwide News Service. Bookies were told to switch carriers or else.
* * *
The growth of General News Bureau paralleled that of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company In 1894 Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patents expired. Within a few years, over 6,000 local telephone companies were competing for the U.S. market. AT&T acquired or drove most of them out of business. Though AT&T's techniques were more gentlemanly than Annenberg's, the result was about the same. The government stepped in with an antitrust suit. The legal action was settled in 1913 with an agreement that AT&T permit competing phone companies to connect to its long-distance network. In 1915 the first coast-to-coast telephone line went into operation. The following year, AT&T was added to the Dow Jones average. With its now-legal monopoly and reliable dividend, AT&T was reputed to be a favorite stock of widows and orphans.
Few of those widows and orphans realized how closely the phone company's business was connected to bookmaking. General News Bureau did not own the wires connecting every racetrack and bookie joint. It leased lines and equipment from AT&T, much as today's Internet services lease cables and routers. Both telegraph and voice lines were used. As the system grew more sophisticated, voice lines provided live track commentary.
AT&T's attorneys worried about this side of the business. An in-house legal opinion from 1924 read: "These applicants [the racing wire services] must know that a majority of their customers are bound to be owners of poolrooms and bookmakers. They cannot willfully blind themselves to these facts and, in fact, set up their ignorance of what everybody knows in order to cooperate with lawbreakers."
On legal advice, AT&T put an escape clause in its contract with the wire lessees. The clause gave the phone company the right to cancel service should authorities judge the lessee's business illegal. AT&T continued to do business with bookies-while officially it could claim to be shocked that gambling was going on in its network. By the mid-l930s, Moe Annenberg was AT&T's fifth largest customer.
* * *
Annenberg's takeover of the wire service business infuriated the other stockholders of General News Bureau, who now owned shares in a company with practically no customers. One stockholder, Chicago mobster John Lynch, took Annenberg to court. Annenberg attorney Weymouth Kirkland argued that, because the wire service was patently illegal, the court had no jurisdiction. He cited a 1725 precedent in which an English judge had refused to divide the loot of two disputing highwaymen. The court accepted Kirkland's bold defense.
Lynch appealed to Al Capone's mob. He felt he might got a sympathetic ear as Capone (then in prison for tax evasion) had already made unsuccessful overtures to Annenberg about acquiring the wire service. Capone's enforcer, Frank Nitti, told James Ragan that if he'd ally himself with the Capone mob, Annenberg would be dead in twenty-four hours.
Ragan said no. Annenberg skipped town for Miami. Negotiations between Annenberg and Capone's people dragged on for a couple of years. It was eventually agreed that Annenberg would pay Capone's people $1 million a year in protection money, but Annenberg would retain ownership of the wire service.
Then, in 1939, Annenberg was up on tax evasion charges. In order to prove he was a reformed man, he did the unthinkable. He walked away from the wire service.
The vacuum created did not last long. The wire service was quickly reconstituted under the name of Continental Press Service. James Ragan remained at the helm.
Again the Chicago mob approached Ragan about taking over. Ragan still wasn't interested. To protect himself, he prepared affidavits implicating Frank Nitti in the attempted murder of Annenberg. He let it be known that should anything happen to him, the affidavits would go to the FBI.
The most powerful Italian and Jewish mobsters of the time were allied in a national organization cryptically called "the Combination." The Combination decided it didn't need Ragan. It founded its own wire service, Trans-American Publishing and News Service, with the intention of putting Continental out of business.
Trans-American was run by Ben Siegel. Better known as "Bugsy," a name he hated, Siegel was a New Yorker who had moved to the West Coast. Trans-American's territory included Nevada-a special case, since gambling was legal there. Siegel decided that Nevada bookies should pay more, not less. He reasoned that casino book-making operations are a way to draw people into the casinos so that they will play the other games Siegel therefore charged the casino bookies the usual subscription price plus a cut of their income-in some cases, as much as 100 percent of the bookmaking income.
* * *
On June 24, 1945, James Ragan stopped his car at a Chicago intersection. A banana truck full of crates pulled up next to him. Someone on the truck pulled up a tarpaulin. Two shots rang out. One mangled Ragan's arm and shoulder. Ragan spent the next six weeks under police guard in a Chicago hospital. Despite that, someone apparently poisoned Ragan by putting mercury in his Coca-Colas, or his catheter, according to various accounts. With Ragan dead, the mob seized Continental Press.
The synergy of merging Continental Press and Trans-American did not escape anyone. It didn't escape Los Angeles bookies, who were compelled to subscribe to both wire services at $150 a week each. But Siegel decided that Trans-American was really his own business, not the Combination's. Siegel was building the Flamingo hotel and casino in Las Vegas It had cost far more than projected, and Siegel owed the construction company $2 million. Siegel told the Combination's "board of directors" in New York that they could have the Trans-American wire service back for only $2 million. The board's response was cool.
Siegel later got word that the Combination had called another board of directors meeting without inviting him. That was a bad sign. Siegel was concerned enough to track down the exiled Lucky Luciano in Havana. Siegel insisted he needed to keep the wire service and its profits one more year Luciano, still one of the most powerful men in the Combination, advised Siegel to give the wire service back immediately. One implausibly verbatim contemporary account records Siegel's reply as: "Go to hell and take the rest of those bastards along with you. I'll keep the goddamn wire as long as I want."
There had been a rule that no board member got the death sentence. The Combination broke that rule for the first time with Siegel. On June 20, 1947, an unknown gunman took aim at Siegel through the trellis of a rose arbor in Beverly Hills. He fired a full clip of steel-jacketed bullets from a .30 caliber army carbine. Most missed. The four that didn't were more than enough to do the job. Siegel's right eyeball came to rest fifteen feet away, on the tile of a dining room floor.
A half hour before the murder, four toughs assembled in the lobby of the Flamingo. At the appointed time, they walked over to the manager and announced that they were taking over. The Combination took over Siegel's wire service, too.
Continues...
Excerpted from Fortune's Formulaby William Poundstone Copyright ©2006 by William Poundstone. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : 0809045990
- Publisher : Hill and Wang; First Edition (September 19, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 386 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780809045990
- ISBN-13 : 978-0809045990
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.4 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #80,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Roulette
- #170 in Stock Market Investing (Books)
- #353 in Introduction to Investing
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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William Poundstone is the author of two previous Hill and Wang books: Fortune's Formula and Gaming the Vote.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book engaging and entertaining. They appreciate the well-presented information theory, mob history, and investment folklore. The story is well-told with interesting characters and anecdotes. Overall, customers consider the book a worthwhile read for investors, managers, and risk-takers.
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Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They appreciate the author's detailed style, which draws them in further with each chapter. The book is filled with good stories and explanations.
"...Before I get into the review of this excellent and very interesting book I want to relate an experience I had some years ago, sometime in the early..." Read more
"...It also is a hilarious and insightful history of gambling from the Bernoulli's in the 1700s through the hedge fund traders of the late 1990's...." Read more
"...For the most part, it is an interesting read though there are sections that bog down...." Read more
"Educational and entertaining. Warner Bros used to be owned by a company in bed with the mafia...." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and informative. They appreciate its context and educational approach. The book provides a non-mathematical narrative on historically popular betting systems and an account of the evolution of probabilistic approaches to money management.
"...Poundstone explains in detail how all this happened and it is a fascinating story...." Read more
"...the lives of a few major contributors to investment theory, information theory, and betting theory: Claude Shannon, who invented Information Theory..." Read more
"...I'd recommend the book as an interesting historical look at some people who tried to beat the house - in gambling or investing - and as a primer on..." Read more
"Educational and entertaining. Warner Bros used to be owned by a company in bed with the mafia...." Read more
Customers find the story well-told and interesting. They appreciate the insights into Shannon's communication theory and colorful characters. The book provides entertaining anecdotes and fantastic life stories about world gamblers like Rudy Guliani, Michael Milken, and Ivan Boesky. Readers also enjoy learning the details of relationships between scientists involved in creating the money management system.
"...He is an outstanding and prolific journalist as well as an MIT grad, although I must say that the organization of the book was a bit freestyle...." Read more
"No, it's not a novel, but some of the characters in this book are soooo interesting...." Read more
"...It's a well-told biographical account of the people involved. It's not a trading / investment / gambling reference, though...." Read more
"...Also an interesting study of the people involved through the years that in one way or another built upon the work of previous studies and research...." Read more
Customers find the book well worth the money. They say it covers stock trading, investing, personal finance, and gambling. It's an important book for investors, managers, and risk-takers.
"...This book covers stock trading, investing, casinos, parking lots (haha, yeah!) mob activities, game theory...." Read more
"...is very well researched and it contains history of gambling, and investment and how information theory evolved...." Read more
"...It's a fun mix of information theory, mob history, big-money investment folklore..." Read more
"...It's hard to classify. Economics and the stock market, personal finance, gambling primer, the development and practice of communications theory..." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2017“Fortune’s Formula” is the Kelly Criterion from J.L. Kelly Jr. who was a mathematician at Bell Labs in the 1950s. Essentially the formula gives the optimal size of bets in order to win as much as possible over time while reducing the risk of ruin. The thing for the reader to realize is that the Kelly Criterion has no utility unless the bettor or investor has an advantage. That needs to be repeated: on an even bet, such as tossing a coin the Kelly strategy is to bet nothing, zero, zilch.
Before I get into the review of this excellent and very interesting book I want to relate an experience I had some years ago, sometime in the early 1980s. I thought I had come up with a way to bet on baseball games in Las Vegas with an advantage over the line (that is over the bookie’s vigorish). For a season I studied results compared to the betting line. I was so sure I had a clear advantage that the next problem became how to run up my money efficiently without taking the chance of going broke. In other words, non-mathematician that I am, I was seeking something like Kelly’s Criterion. And what I came up with turned out to be very similar to his formula, although I don’t recall exactly. Unfortunately when I got to Las Vegas it didn’t take me long to realize I had no advantage and therefore didn’t make any bets.
Okay, back to the book. An excellent way to get an idea of the scope of this work is to look at the parts. Part One is titled “Entropy,” Part Two is “Blackjack,” Part Three is “Arbitrage,” Part Four is “St Petersburg Wager,” Part Five is “RICO” (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization), Part Six is “Blowing Up,” and Part Seven is “Signal and Noise.” Along the way you will meet gangsters, the Italian and Jewish mafias, a young and very aggressive Rudolph Giuliani, the Hong Kong horseracing scene in which some people made millions (it was the only legal betting allowed by law in Hong Kong) and some keen ideas on how to make money gambling or investing. But what really makes this book so interesting is the light that Poundstone shines on two giants in the science of information, gambling and investing, namely Claude Shannon and Edward O. Thorp.
Shannon is known as the father of information theory and in many respects as the founder of the digital world we live in today. He was also an astute investor as Poundstone reveals. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that Shannon was a genius.
Thorp first became known to the public with his book “Beat the Dealer” (first edition, 1962) which presented a winning strategy for blackjack. I read that book when I was still in my twenties with great enthusiasm but never employed the strategies since my memory is rather ordinary. Instead I played poker, but that, as they say, is another story. What is astonishing about Thorp that I learned here is that his hedge fund, Princeton-Newport Partners was one of the most successful ever. A dollar invested in the fund in 1969 would grow to $14.78 in1988. Yes, wow.
Poundstone explains in detail how all this happened and it is a fascinating story. I’m amazed at how much work he put into this book and all the information he acquired. He is an outstanding and prolific journalist as well as an MIT grad, although I must say that the organization of the book was a bit freestyle. Additionally there are some errors and some unclear passages. Consider this on page 39: Ed Thorp (as a boy) “would buy a pack of Kool-Aid for five cents and sell the mixed beverage to hot WPA workers for one cent a glass. Ed could get six glasses from a pack for a penny profit.”
What is not right here is that you needed to add sugar to the Kool Aid which would be an additional expense.
On page 68, Poundstone writes: “Kelly described his idea this way: A ‘gambler with a private wire’ gets advanced word of the outcome of baseball games or horse races…”
It’s unclear what year this was but regardless of the year you can’t get “advanced word of the outcome” of a baseball game.
One more example: Poundstone writes: “In 1993 Ed Thorp” learned from a computer science person who “had discovered” that pro basketball teams “that had to travel to the city in which a game was played tended to do poorer than a team that didn’t have to travel. A team that had to play a number of games in a row did poorer on average than a team given more rest between games. These variables were not properly weighted in bookies’ odds.” (p. 322)
This is not true even in 1993. The two factors mentioned are just exactly the sorts of factors that are built into the bookies’ betting line, as any serious sports bettor knows.
Part of the pleasure in reading this book is in the way that Poundstone exposes stupidity in what would seem to be high places. Here’s a quote from Mark Rubenstein who is a professor of finance at UC Berkeley. He’s talking about the Black Monday stock market crash of October 19, 1987:
“So improbable is such an event that it would not be anticipated to occur even if the stock market were to last for 20 billion years, the upper end of the currently estimated duration of the universe. Indeed, such an event should not occur even if the stock market were to enjoy a rebirth for 20 billion years in each of 20 billion big bangs.”
Gee, I hope he was just funning us.
(BTW, my baseball betting delusion came about because I used the line in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner which was a stale line that didn’t account for recency. My approach was to weight recent results more heavily that older results. When I got to Vegas and saw the Vegas line it was clear that their betting lines did indeed consider recency.)
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
- Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2008This book is a concise look at the evolution of formal investment theory, with continual contextual references to its ties to gambling and to organized crime. It also is a hilarious and insightful history of gambling from the Bernoulli's in the 1700s through the hedge fund traders of the late 1990's.
The author devotes over 50 pages to notes and the index. This was appreciated since I wanted to look up more about so many of the anecdotes he included.
Mr. Poundstone poignantly describes the downfall of high-flying firms such as LTCM, where the investment wizards went from the darlings of Wall Street to the dredges of the investment community in large part because they were so clever; and they started to believe they were infallible.
One LTCM road-show presentation was held at the insurance company Conseco in Indianapolis. Andrew Chow, a Conseco derivatives trader, interrupted Scholes. "There aren't that many opportunities," Chow objected. "You can't make that kind of money in Treasury markets."
Scholes snapped: "You're the reason - because of fools like you we can." (Page 281)
Warren Buffett marveled at how "ten or 15 guys with an average IQ of maybe 170" could get themselves "into a position where they can lose all their money." That was much the sentiment of Daniel Bernoulli, way back in 1738, when he wrote: "A man who risks his entire fortune acts like a simpleton, however great may be the possible gain." (Page 291)
He also points out the real world flaws in some theoretically appealing scams. The St. Petersburg Wager seems mathematically correct; yet it overlooks a vitally important constraint (pages 182-184). Another is the unfounded weight we unconsciously give to historical returns, as evidenced by his retelling of another Warren Buffett story:
In a 1984 speech, Buffett asked his listeners to imagine that all 215 million Americans pair off and bet a dollar on the outcome of a coin toss. The one who calls the toss incorrectly is eliminated and pays his dollar to the one who was correct.
The next day, the winners pair off and play the same game with each other, each now betting $2. Losers are eliminated and that day's winners end up with $4. The game continues with a new toss at doubled stakes each day. After twenty tosses, 215 people will be left in the game. Each will have over a million dollars.
According to Buffett, some of these people will write books on their methods: "How I Turned a Dollar into a Million in Twenty Days Working Thirty Seconds a Morning." Some will badger ivory-tower economists who say it can't be done: "If it can't be done, why are there 215 us?" "Then some business school professor will probably be rude enough to bring up the fact that if 215 million orangutans had engaged in a similar exercise, the result would be the same - 215 egotistical orangutans with 20 straight winning flips." (Page 314)
The author follows the lives of a few major contributors to investment theory, information theory, and betting theory: Claude Shannon, who invented Information Theory and paved the way for the digital computer age; John Kelly, who developed the formula for gains with no possibility of ruin; and Edward Thorpe, who built upon these findings and beat the roulette wheels, the blackjack tables and the investment fund managers.
It's a fast read - only 329 pages before the notes and index. I highly recommend it!
- Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2018It's hard to describe what this book is. Is it a primer on betting strategies? A look at practical math? A history of mathematically inclined gamblers? A "mob" story? A manual for cash management in investing?
The book has facets of each, though in the end, the main takeaway is the superiority of the Kelly system for managing bankrolls whether gambling or investing.
For the most part, it is an interesting read though there are sections that bog down. I'd recommend the book as an interesting historical look at some people who tried to beat the house - in gambling or investing - and as a primer on the Kelly method but I wouldn't suggest that anyone head to Vegas or Wall St. with their kid's college savings based on this book.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2024Educational and entertaining. Warner Bros used to be owned by a company in bed with the mafia. The company in question owned parking lots in NYC.
Claude Shannon is the most successful investor you’ve never heard of (founder of information theory that touches everything in your life). Even more successful than Peter Lynch, Joel Greenblatt and Warren Buffett.
If you don’t think probabilistically this book will help you do so. You’ll make better life decisions.
Top reviews from other countries
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Camila ZelayaReviewed in Brazil on July 3, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Sensacional
Chegou antes do prazo! Amei!
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FERNANDO DIAZ LOPEZReviewed in Mexico on December 5, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente libro!!
Una lectura ampliamante recomendable para aquellas personas que les gusta el mercado de valores, las apuestas e historias de personas brillantes que incursionaron en estos temas. El libro va entrelazando personajes de manera inteligente y, al menos en mi caso, cada vez quería continuar leyendo sin parar.
- KKReviewed in Canada on July 13, 2016
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for people into casinos and gambling, stock markets and wall street, or simply trying to money
This is a really interested book. I thought is started out a little slow and was hard to get into, but it picks up. It's super interesting how mathematical everything is. The book is good if you are into casinos and gambling, stock markets and wall street, or simply trying to money, as it blurs the line between wagering and investing which almost comes down to being the same thing. It is a good read and provides a fascinating look into how a couple guys developed a formula for making money.
- Shashank V. NerurkarReviewed in India on February 13, 2016
5.0 out of 5 stars Distinct approach to betting systems and its use in investing
The book covers subject of scientific betting system developed by great minds like Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp. They used the system to beat casinos to start with and then used same principles to earn handsome returns in stock markets. The author has developed a dry subject into an interesting read with topics covering stories of mafias, casinos and activism of the likes of Rudy Giuliani, LTCM fiasco etc. Every story eventually leads to betting system and betting syndicates. In the process the author has explained the Kelly criterion in great details with ample examples of its practical use by successful investors and portfolio managers. We are also introduced to the genius of Claude Shannon, the father of Information Theory and Digital Revolution.The book is a must read for every serious investor. The book is highly recommended by no less than Charlie Munger.
- mzaradzkiReviewed in France on June 2, 2012
5.0 out of 5 stars mixing top scientific mind and the fringe of our society
Entertaining from the start till the end. Another great book from Poundstone shedding lights on fabulous characters of the 20th in various fields ranging from the fringe of the society to the scientific world.
As usual the reader will gain great insight on the many topics covered.