i've dug ditches on the road to glory
(reading dump post)
So recently I've been reading a number of finance books. I particularly enjoyed Derman's book My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance. Some of my favorite quotes:
I identified with this, though on a smaller scale:
I had a passion for the content of physics, but I was also possessed by a hungry ambition for its earthly rewards. Both passion and hunger persisted over the years, despite the inevitable disappointments. Ten years later, as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition's degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T. D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.
He spends a lot of time describing the difference between academic, public-sector, and corporate life. The following excerpt is a nice capture:
I spent one month that summer in Erice, a beautiful town high above Trapani in western Sicily, where I attended the annual Ettore Majorana particle physics summer school. Up on the mountain I had a tantalizing glimpse of the life of successful physicists on the conference circuit, who visited exotic places each summer. I sat with some of them in the town plaza, smoking cigarettes and sipping Italian aperitifs. One morning I had a hot shave at the local barber shop, where I lay tilted back in a heavy leather chair while the barber sharpened his razor on a strop. Years later i met corporate lawyers and Wall Street salesmen who touted the fringe benefits of their jobs -- first-class flights, expensive meals, and fancy hotels. I silently scorned their focus on the material benefits of work. In physics, I thought, the life itself was the benefit; talking about physics to interesting people in interesting places was the main dish, not the cutlery.
And I thought the following observation interesting, though I don't know enough of immigrant mentality to really understand it:
Most quants, then and now, came from abroad because immigrants often see the quickest path to success in hands-on work. It's the next generation that prefers management and business school.
Some particularly expressive reader had underlined it in pencil and written 'True!!' next to it.
I think this CosmicVariance post deals with some of the issues mentioned in the book. (physics, genius, hard work, useful achievement)
But I'm curious about the finance part too.. so I'm currently working through this book, which is a nice minimal-technical introduction to derivatives.
So recently I've been reading a number of finance books. I particularly enjoyed Derman's book My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance. Some of my favorite quotes:
I identified with this, though on a smaller scale:
I had a passion for the content of physics, but I was also possessed by a hungry ambition for its earthly rewards. Both passion and hunger persisted over the years, despite the inevitable disappointments. Ten years later, as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition's degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T. D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.
He spends a lot of time describing the difference between academic, public-sector, and corporate life. The following excerpt is a nice capture:
I spent one month that summer in Erice, a beautiful town high above Trapani in western Sicily, where I attended the annual Ettore Majorana particle physics summer school. Up on the mountain I had a tantalizing glimpse of the life of successful physicists on the conference circuit, who visited exotic places each summer. I sat with some of them in the town plaza, smoking cigarettes and sipping Italian aperitifs. One morning I had a hot shave at the local barber shop, where I lay tilted back in a heavy leather chair while the barber sharpened his razor on a strop. Years later i met corporate lawyers and Wall Street salesmen who touted the fringe benefits of their jobs -- first-class flights, expensive meals, and fancy hotels. I silently scorned their focus on the material benefits of work. In physics, I thought, the life itself was the benefit; talking about physics to interesting people in interesting places was the main dish, not the cutlery.
And I thought the following observation interesting, though I don't know enough of immigrant mentality to really understand it:
Most quants, then and now, came from abroad because immigrants often see the quickest path to success in hands-on work. It's the next generation that prefers management and business school.
Some particularly expressive reader had underlined it in pencil and written 'True!!' next to it.
I think this CosmicVariance post deals with some of the issues mentioned in the book. (physics, genius, hard work, useful achievement)
But I'm curious about the finance part too.. so I'm currently working through this book, which is a nice minimal-technical introduction to derivatives.