It was buried deep, deep in the Arts section of Tuesday’s NYT, but nonetheless, sitting in an airport food court, I found it:
‘Hitchhiker’s Guide’ Sequel Lands in Britain
Apparently it is not standard practice for British men and women to gather dressed in bathrobes and toting towels. When hundreds of fans thus clad assembled in London on Sunday, it was to celebrate the 30th anniversary of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the comedic science-fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams, and the publication of a new book in the series, The Guardian reported. At Hitchcon 09, held at the Royal Festival Hall in London, fans assembled (many of them dressed in the shabby costume of the series’s hapless hero, Arthur Dent) to pay tribute to Mr. Adams, who died in 2001. He was the author of the original “Hitchhiker’s Guide” radio plays and the five-book sequence they spawned.
And most importantly:
The convention also served as a kickoff for “And Another Thing…,” a new novel by the “Artemis Fowl” author Eoin Colfer that is cheekily being billed as the sixth entry in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” trilogy. The American edition of “And Another Thing…” was released by Hyperion on Monday.
In a post called “So Long and Thanks for All the F-Tests“, Freakonomics writes about a new book called Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist’s Companion, which they describe as:
…the rare book that captures the feeling of how to go about trying to attack an empirical question; and it does this by working through two or three dozen of the neatest empirical papers of the last decade…. It is also peppered with references to Douglas Adams’s writing — so what’s not to like?
Now, wait a second. TGR is peppered with Douglas Adams references. TGR has a post titled “F-tests begone!” How did I miss this?
(Freakonomics’ post title and the book’s title are themselves HHG2G references. I have refrained… for the moment.)
Russell Napier wrote the book on identifying bear market bottoms (really) and Alphaville provides selections from an interview he recently gave to the FT. Fascinating stuff, if you like reading your news through Roubini-tinted glasses.
The concept of identifying any sort of local minimum without the benefit of hindsight is inherently questionable, but the use of indicators (such as P/E or q ratios) to identify what is most likely not a bottom may hold more water.
But to sum it all up, I can’t do any better than www.isthisthebottom.com.
Tonight after squash I started to cook dinner, but after setting off the smoke alarm for what I must confess was the second time since I moved here, I headed over to Harry’s Steakhouse/Cafe (I’m not sure which one I go to. I think it’s the cafe. Whichever one is downstairs.). After a late match, I like to sit at the bar or one of the nearby high tables, have one of their awesome burgers and a beer (Heineken, yes) and bring a book. I stay and read until I’m tired, and then I come home and fall asleep. It’s pretty much a perfect after-squash ritual (If I’m not alone then it’s convenient to stay at the Harvard Club — the burgers are fantastic and surprisingly cheap; one suspects they take a loss on food to make up for gouging us on everything else…).
All of which was simply a long introduction to the only reason I’m still awake now — a great book I was just reading at Harry’s called (boredom alert) How I Became A Quant. So far (I’m only on the second chapter), this is one of the best finance books I’ve read, and so far it’s not even very much about finance. It’s basically a collection of stories by 25 prominent quants about how they stumbled upon their careers. Sort of like 25 mini-versions of My Life as a Quant stitched together. Anyway, the introduction opens with this:
Because you are reading this introduction, one of four things must be true. Your are a quant and are intrigued by the idea of reading the stories of others like you. You are not a quant, but aspire to quantness, and you are seeking some insight on how to achieve that goal. You are neither a quant, nor have such aspirations, but you want to understand the way Wall Street really works, perhaps to gain some perspective on the vast and unsympathetic forces affecting your life in mysterious ways. Or, missheleved among the science fiction and fantasy titles by a harried employee, the title has struck your fancy as, perhaps, a potentially satisfying space opera. There might be other things besides these four, but we can’t think of any.
So basically if Dave Barry wrote a finance book, it would turn out like this one. Or, uh, this one. Anyway, the first chapter – which has proven much funnier than the second – includes a pretty apt description of a certain school:
Harvard University, the school up the road that once wanted to merge with MIT and call the combination Harvard…
All around it’s shaping up as one of the better books I’ve read in a while (Hitchhiker’s Guide notwithstanding). And yes, that’s the Black-Scholes equation up there. The book seems quite obsessed with it.