Published by Oneworld Publications, 2017, softcover, illustrated, index, 396 pages, condition: new.
A child of the Great Depression, legendary mathematician Edward O. Thorp invented card counting, proving the seemingly impossible: that you could beat the dealer at the blackjack table. As a result he launched a gambling renaissance. His remarkable success--and mathematically unassailable method--caused such an uproar that casinos altered the rules of the game to thwart him and the legions he inspired. They barred him from their premises, even put his life in jeopardy. Nonetheless, gambling was forever changed.
Thereafter, Thorp shifted his sights to "the biggest casino in the world" Wall Street. Devising and then deploying mathematical formulas to beat the market, Thorp ushered in the era of quantitative finance we live in today. Along the way, the so-called godfather of the quants played bridge with Warren Buffett, crossed swords with a young Rudy Giuliani, detected the Bernie Madoff scheme, and, to beat the game of roulette, invented, with Claude Shannon, the world's first wearable computer.
Here, for the first time, Thorp tells the story of what he did, how he did it, his passions and motivations, and the curiosity that has always driven him to disregard conventional wisdom and devise game-changing solutions to seemingly insoluble problems. An intellectual thrill ride, replete with practical wisdom that can guide us all in uncertain financial waters, A Man for All Markets is an instant classic--a book that challenges its readers to think logically about a seemingly irrational world.
"Ed Thorp, author of Beat the Dealer and Beat the Market, about winning at blackjack and winning in the stock market, takes a very straightforward approach to writing about his life and it works well. As a physicist and mathematician, he tackled the questions of roulette wheels and blackjack games in a scientific way and found that it was possible to beat the house. Once he had exhausted that topic to his satisfaction and the dismay of the casinos, he moved on to the bigger casino of the stock market. Who IS this guy who, using pure brain power, managed to become fabulously wealthy while staying remarkably grounded?
Thorp describes his research and discoveries about roulette, blackjack, option trading, and more, in easy-to-understand language, for a general audience. You need no prior experience dealing with probability or securities or anything else. (He even explains at one point that a molecule is a collection of atoms bound by electrical forces.) He also tells stories about the wealthy and famous people he encountered because of his books about beating the dealer and the market.
I also enjoyed the final chapters in which he moves away from memoir to talk about good investment strategies and how the 2008 market crash came about and why it is likely to happen again. I was looking forward to this book even before I knew it would be written -- someone would have to write about this man's life eventually, and I'm glad that Thorp himself did it."
