Nov

6

I am currently reading Nate Silver's book The Signal and the Noise : Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't.

I really enjoyed the piece on weather forecasting by the government and how computers and humans play. Apparently weather.gov meteorologists take very detailed notes on their individual performance over the computer to make sure they are "adding value." In the process, they have significantly improved their own weather predictions. It also touches upon traversing the massive amount of data humans have access to and how people are not obsolete…yet,

I uploaded the pages from the book here (pages 120-122).

Seems like there are many links to trading here.

The forecasting done in weather is incredibly complex and it's quite amazing the leaps that they've taken. The fact that they could give a small radius of where Sandy would land when it combined with other storms and fronts was absolutely amazing. Weather forecasters could evacuate areas and save lives with time to do so. Weather is incredibly difficult and computationally expensive to simulate and predict. So for them being able to do that….just wow.

And on another note, I do not think forecasters misled the public at all on Sandy. News here (lower Manhattan) was very concerned about the upcoming storm and they encouraged everybody to evacuate. They had constant feeds and were constantly changing their forecasts based on new data coming in, which I hear is more prudent than what many novice traders do.

Sep

20

Like Michael Lewis's classic Liar's Poker, Jared Dillian's Street Freak takes readers behind the scenes of the legendary Lehman Brothers, exposing its outrageous and often hilarious corporate culture.

In this ultracompetitive Ivy League world where men would flip over each other's ties to check out the labels (also known as the "Lehman Handshake"), Dillian was an outsider as an ex-military, working-class guy in a Men's Wearhouse suit. But he was scrappy and determined; in interviews he told potential managers that, "Nobody can work harder than me. Nobody is willing to put in the hours I will put in. I am insane."

As it turned out, on Wall Street insanity is not an undesirable quality.

Dillian rose from green associate, checking IDs at the entrance to the trading floor in the paranoid days following 9/11, to become an integral part of Lehman's culture in its final years as the firm's head Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) trader. More than $1 trillion in wealth passed through his hands, but at the cost of an untold number of smashed telephones and tape dispensers. Over time, the exhilarating and explosively stressful job took its toll on him. The extreme highs and lows of the trading floor masked and exacerbated the symptoms of Dillian's undiagnosed bipolar and obsessive compulsive disorders, leading to a downward spiral that eventually landed him in a psychiatric ward.

Dillian put his life back together, returning to work healthier than ever before, but Lehman itself had seemingly gone mad, having made outrageous bets on commercial real estate, and was quickly headed for self-destruction.

A raucous account of the final years of Lehman Brothers, from 9/11 at its World Financial Center offices through the firm's bankruptcy, including vivid portraits of trading-floor culture, the financial meltdown, and the company's ultimate collapse, Street Freak is a raw, visceral, and wholly original memoir of life inside the belly of the beast during the most tumultuous time in financial history. In his electrifying and fresh voice, Dillian takes readers on a wild ride through madness and back, both inside Lehman Brothers and himself.

He will be speaking today at the Union Square Barnes and Nobles at 6pm

BARNES & NOBLE
105 5th Avenue @ 18th Street
New York,NY
6:00PM

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