Book cover of Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street

Book description

An innovative guide that identifies what distinguishes the best financial risk takers from the rest

From 1987 to 1992, a small group of Wall Street quants invented an entirely new way of managing risk to maximize success: risk management for risk-takers. This is the secret that lets tiny quantitative edges…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Red-Blooded Risk as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

All investing is risk-taking, and this is the best book on risk-taking that I know. Not just risk-taking as mathematics or games (although both of those are important), but risk-taking as a philosophy of life.

I would pick out two main insights. First, risk is intrinsically neither good nor bad, it is just a dial you can turn up or down. Second, your aim should be neither to minimise nor maximise risk, but rather to take the right amount of risk, and so achieve what this book calls “risk ignition”.

One contextual caveat: the value I see here is a…

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Book cover of Aggressor

Aggressor by FX Holden,

It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.

The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…

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