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Posts

February 27, 2013

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12:46 PM | Why It’s Smart to Be Reckless on Wall Street
Here is a guaranteed way to get paid well if you work on Wall Street. Find a best friend at a competing bank or hedge fund and take opposite sides of the same large bet. In one year’s time one of you will have a huge profit and get paid well. The other person will [...]
Scientific American - Guest Blog
General Science

February 10, 2013

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3:56 PM | Too big to succeed
On December 20, 1994 Mexico’s newly installed president Ernesto Zedillo devalued the currency, the peso, by 15%. As a candidate he had said he would “defend the peso like a dog.” That day the peso went from 3.47, where it had been for a year, to 3.95 and the trading floors of Wall Street were [...]
Scientific American - Guest Blog
General Science

January 30, 2013

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12:04 PM | The Real, and Simple, Equation That Killed Wall Street
“If it weren’t for those meddling kids!” That was the punch line for every Scooby Doo episode. It also is the overly simple narrative that many in the media have spun about the last financial crisis. Smart meddling kids armed with math hoodwinked us all. One article, from the March 2009 Wired magazine, even pinpointed [...]
Scientific American - Guest Blog
General Science

January 14, 2013

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2:18 PM | How to lose 3 million dollars in one second?
Losing money is one of the loneliest feelings. It was Oct 22nd, 2008. Lehman Brothers, the investment bank, had filed for bankruptcy the month before. The markets were panicking. A thousand people surrounded me, almost all of us slouched in our seats, staring at computer screens. I had eight, all flashing prices of assets that [...]
Scientific American - Guest Blog
General Science
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