22 reviewed The poker face of Wall Street by Aaron Brown
Review of 'The poker face of Wall Street' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Look. He tells you up front what this book is about: “Finance can only be understood as a gambling game, and gambling games can only be understood as a form of finance.” A nice video tl;dr I can recommend is his guest lecture at MIT called “Poker Economics”. In about sixty minutes at 1.5x, you’ll have gotten a nice sparse projection into this book.
Look. It took me almost exactly nine years to finish this book—and I’ve had it this whole time, and thought about it this whole time. I started (by way of Nassim Taleb’s introduction, before Taleb became a fascist apologist) when I was a young whippersnapper who wouldn’t recognize the real world was if I bumped into it on the street—because the ideas presented here did bump into my over the years, in terms of risks, lifestyles, and choices, and it recognize them as such only …
Look. He tells you up front what this book is about: “Finance can only be understood as a gambling game, and gambling games can only be understood as a form of finance.” A nice video tl;dr I can recommend is his guest lecture at MIT called “Poker Economics”. In about sixty minutes at 1.5x, you’ll have gotten a nice sparse projection into this book.
Look. It took me almost exactly nine years to finish this book—and I’ve had it this whole time, and thought about it this whole time. I started (by way of Nassim Taleb’s introduction, before Taleb became a fascist apologist) when I was a young whippersnapper who wouldn’t recognize the real world was if I bumped into it on the street—because the ideas presented here did bump into my over the years, in terms of risks, lifestyles, and choices, and it recognize them as such only now, as a slightly wiser whippersnapper who still could walk past the real world without noticing.
Look. Unless you are Aaron Brown, this book will be a melange of topics that are very rarely combined. So don’t expect it to follow some genre-guided format! There’s poker, which I knew nothing about—and it is a vast new world for me. There’s probability. There’s game theory and it’s misapplications. There’s finance. There’s trading. There’s economics. (These three are very different.) There’re also his memoirs. The resulting combination is important and relevant but I think it might take a few years for that to become clear.
I leave you with two lessons a young Aaron Brown learned from poker: (1) information costs money, and (2) mistakes cost money.