Category Archives: Finance

by Gerald Knight I can’t tell you how much I wanted to like this book. I’ve admired O’Reilly’s technical books for years, and now that I’ve branched out into business applications, I was delighted to see that they had, too. When I finished business school last year, one of the classes I had to take was in financial modeling, and it had a heavy Excel emphasis. We did a little bit with Macros and VBA, but the most complex model we did was nothing compared to what this book aimed […]

by Robert F. Bruner One of the problems with books of historical case studies is a lack of general principles, and a feeling that the authors are looking in the back of the book for the answers. The post-mortems don’t really offer any guidance for the pre-mortem. A book like Thinking In Time, popular with the public administration crowd, seems too clever by half, proving the importance of judgment without helping much to develop it. It compares the handling of two different potential epidemics, but which one applies to the […]

by Benoit Mandelbrot According to Modern Portfolio Theory, the basis for most of modern stock market analysis, the crash of October 1987 shouldn’t have happened in our lifetimes. In fact, it shouldn’t have happened in the lifetime of the country. It should have happened, perhaps, once in the lifetime of the universe. It was just our good fortune to have lived through it. Now we can relax. In fact, even as Robert Merton and Myron Scholes were accepting the Nobel Prize for their contributions, the markets were preparing to given […]

Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the legends behind it by Nicholas Dunbar When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, Life comes along, sneaking up behind you with a bit of lead piping, to steal from P.G. Wodehouse. The story of Long Term Capital Management is the story of The Smartest Guys in the World, and how maybe they just managed to outsmart themselves. In the meantime, they almost collapsed […]