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A Bildungsroman, one jacket blurb calls this book--and sure, it's a traditional coming-of-age tale. But the story itself is anything but conventional. Goodkin grew up in Chicago, a successful teenage gambler who started playing the market while still in high school. After getting a law degree from Northwestern, he landed in New York at the end of the 1960s. Frustrated with the limited data available to his first broker, and with chatter growing louder about a coming Information Age, „nobody had to tell me that Wall Street, with its polished brass spittoons, was a technological backwater,“ writes Goodkin. It was Goodkin who first computerized arbitrage. Working on an MBA at Columbia, he spotted an opportunity in the emerging field of econometrics. His hustler's background helped him rope a group of future Nobel economists--including Paul Samuelson--into starting an experimental hedge fund with him. The pleasures of the book lie in the story of their bumpy path to success. The legendary merchant banker Sir Sigmund Warburg--who in 1970 was still the City of London's éminence grise--listens bemusedly to Goodkin's pitch. "'A computer. Fancy that.' And then his eyes lost their twinkle. 'Preposterous. Utterly preposterous!'""Even after the 2008 crisis proved that many of the banks' computer-based models were flawed, computers and „rocket scientists“ still play a major role on Wall Street. They have pioneers like 70-year-old Michael Goodkin to thank. On paper, Goodkin was an unlikely revolutionary. he was one of the first to spot that computers could be used to automate trading. Goodwin made millions, but he received little public credit. There are no trading tips or secret formulae in the book. Instead, it's what Jordan Simm in Canadian Business calls a 'traditional coming-of-age tale'. But, as Simm points out, 'the story is anything but conventional', providing a window into a time when Wall Street was a very different place. Goodkin's blunt style makes him an engaging writer, while few others have gone from street hustler to high finance via such an interesting path." (MoneyWeek)
The Wrong Answer Faster
The Inside Story of Making the Machine that Trades Trillions
von Michael GoodkinThe fascinating story behind the machines that trade trillions of dollars every day
"A Bildungsroman, one jacket blurb calls this book--and sure, it's a traditional coming-of-age tale. But the story itself is anything but conventional. The pleasures of the book lie in the story of their bumpy path to success." Canadian Business
In 1968, Michael Goodkin is about to graduate from Columbia University. While his classmates interview for jobs, he daydreams of seeing the world as a man of independent means. Noticing that there are no computers on Wall Street and drawing on his experiences as a failed teenage investor and successful gambler, he has an epiphany: since no one knows the right price for anything, the only way to beat the market is to make a computer that comes up with the wrong answer faster than the professionals.
And thus begins a journey that takes this provincial Midwesterner from nearly broke to opulent Park Avenue. The Wrong Answer Faster is the story of unintended consequences: how a technique originally created to minimize market risk spiraled into a multi-trillion dollar game with unparalleled risks.
Having founded and sold a firm that changed the world, Goodkin left New York to travel and play backgammon--only to return to found another groundbreaking firm, Numerix, a software company that substituted computational physics for econometrics to better manage derivative risk. * The story of the computerization of Wall Street by the man at the helm * Packed with keen insights, based almost entirely on poker, backgammon and game theory * Goodkin's unique insight to the markets is that everyone has the wrong answers * The solution is not to try to beat the market but to come up with the wrong answers faster
The epic tale of the untold story how one man with a great idea decided not to play the market but to revolutionize the financial world for generations to come by creating the most ground breaking tool for market players since the ticker tape.
"A Bildungsroman, one jacket blurb calls this book--and sure, it's a traditional coming-of-age tale. But the story itself is anything but conventional. The pleasures of the book lie in the story of their bumpy path to success." Canadian Business
In 1968, Michael Goodkin is about to graduate from Columbia University. While his classmates interview for jobs, he daydreams of seeing the world as a man of independent means. Noticing that there are no computers on Wall Street and drawing on his experiences as a failed teenage investor and successful gambler, he has an epiphany: since no one knows the right price for anything, the only way to beat the market is to make a computer that comes up with the wrong answer faster than the professionals.
And thus begins a journey that takes this provincial Midwesterner from nearly broke to opulent Park Avenue. The Wrong Answer Faster is the story of unintended consequences: how a technique originally created to minimize market risk spiraled into a multi-trillion dollar game with unparalleled risks.
Having founded and sold a firm that changed the world, Goodkin left New York to travel and play backgammon--only to return to found another groundbreaking firm, Numerix, a software company that substituted computational physics for econometrics to better manage derivative risk. * The story of the computerization of Wall Street by the man at the helm * Packed with keen insights, based almost entirely on poker, backgammon and game theory * Goodkin's unique insight to the markets is that everyone has the wrong answers * The solution is not to try to beat the market but to come up with the wrong answers faster
The epic tale of the untold story how one man with a great idea decided not to play the market but to revolutionize the financial world for generations to come by creating the most ground breaking tool for market players since the ticker tape.