• My Life As a Quant : Emanuel Derman

    Otherwise known as “My death as a reader” — what a crashing bore. The first 120 pages, in which Derman tells us of his life before he was a quant, serve as a harbinger of the big nothing to come. Here we learn in mind-sucking detail of his car commuting, the radio stations he listened to…

  • Morningstar 2010: Yoga master class

    Superstar managers at Morningstar Investment Conference attribute part of their success to yoga… Bill Gross at Pimco: The $227.9 billion Total Return Fund became the world’s biggest mutual fund in 2009, as Gross lured in investors with his handling of the financial crisis. Gross saw the mortgage debacle coming and was able to dodge most…

  • Morningstar 2010 Preview

    [My chief areas of interest are shown in boldface below.] Morningstar will host its 22nd annual investment conference for financial advisors Wednesday, June 23 through Friday, June 25, at McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago. This year’s keynote speakers are Jeffrey Gundlach, co-founder, chief executive officer and chief investment officer of DoubleLine Capital, who will…

  • The Big Short : Michael Lewis

    Let me start out by saying this is one of the most important stories of our era, and Michael Lewis has done a masterful job of telling it. Watching the onion of Wall Street being peeled back by a handful of far-sighted and somewhat eccentric short sellers was the perfect way to frame this narrative.…

  • Chicago: A Biography : Dominic A. Pacyga

    Although it’s not my hometown, I’ve lived here over 25 years now. Pacyga’s Chicago contains such a wealth of amazing stories about this big-shouldered town that I was able to entertain locals with things they didn’t know about their own neighborhoods. Like the Civil War Confederate POW camp down the street from me. Fascinating. REPORT…

  • You Are Not a Gadget : Jaron Lanier

    Critics used to be very important people, a fact we tend to forget as newspapers die their slow death. The very idea of criticizing a cultural product — a service that we used to take for granted from critics and reviewers — has been almost seamlessly replaced by marketing and public relations and Yelp and…

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