Liar’s Poker

Posted on Aug 19, 2009 in Books Whilst on the beach in Spain back in July I finally got around to reading Michael Lewis’ book Liar’s Poker where he goes over his experience working for Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. The book is written in 1989 but the settings, the people and their activities are reflective of our own time and the financial world is very similar but obviously not as evolved (or perhaps devolved)...
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Barry Ween, Boy Genius

Posted on Jul 5, 2009 in Books What 10 year old doesn’t daydream about being able to invent wonderful things and build them on his/her own. Unfortunately for many of us we were limited to achieving these goals via Lego bricks or other simplistic means. This is not the case for young Barry Ween, created by Judd Winick and published in the Barry Ween comic books from Oni Press. Barry is a ten year old with an IQ of 350....
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Financial Shock

Posted on May 19, 2009 in Books, Finance I just finished reading the last pages of Financial Shock by Mark Zandi. Zandi is the head of Moody’s Econony.com and a man well seasoned in all things finance. Financial Shock can be best described as the definite guide to why and how our financial system got to the point it collapsed into the current financial crisis. Zandi writes the book in a rather repetitive and at time discontinuous...
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Thicker Than Water

Posted on May 14, 2009 in Books Thicker Than Water is the fourth novel in Mike Carey‘s Felix Castor series (See my thoughts on the earlier books here and here). Before I go on to talk about the book itself I just want to point out that although he series started off really good and has only kept on going better and better which is remarkable. I read the fourth book in three sittings, it was that good, I just couldn’t...
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Dead Men’s Boots

Posted on Apr 20, 2009 in Books I used my flight back to London this past Wednesday to finally finish off reading Mike Carey’s third Felix Castor novel, Dead Men’s Boots. As I’ve mentioned in my post about the previous books in the series; Castor is an London based exorcist who sort of reads like a less powerful version of John Constantine from Hellblazer. Castor is also less of a bastard when compared to...
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Fooled By Randomness

Posted on Mar 20, 2009 in Books, Finance After reading Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan a few months back I kind of figured out that I might as well read Taleb’s first book on the subject, Fooled By Randomness as well. Both Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan make good points about the need of understanding the concepts of fat tale events. The book also makes good points about the things that take place around us being...
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