Heard on The Street: Quantitative Questions from Wall Street Job Interviews


Timothy Falcon Crack - 2000
    The interviewers use the same questions year-after-year and here they are---with solutions! These questions come from all types of interviews (corporate finance, sales and trading, quant research, etc), but they are especially likely in quantitative capital markets job interviews. The questions come from all levels of interviews (undergrad, MBA, PhD), but they are especially likely if you have, or almost have, an MS or MBA. The latest edition includes over 120 non-quantitative actual interview questions, and a new section on interview technique---based partly on Dr. Crack's experiences interviewing candidates for the world's largest institutional asset manager. Dr. Crack has a PhD from MIT. He has won many teaching awards and has publications in the top academic, practitioner, and teaching journals in finance. He has degrees in Mathematics/Statistics, Finance, and Financial Economics and a diploma in Accounting/Finance. Dr. Crack taught at the university level for 20 years including four years as a front line teaching assistant for MBA students at MIT. He recently headed a quantitative active equity research team at the world's largest institutional money manager.

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook


Niall Ferguson - 2017
    It's about states, armies and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change?The 21st century has been hailed as the Age of Networks. However, in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks have always been with us, from the structure of the brain to the food chain, from the family tree to freemasonry. Throughout history, hierarchies housed in high towers have claimed to rule, but often real power has resided in the networks in the town square below. For it is networks that tend to innovate. And it is through networks that revolutionary ideas can contagiously spread. Just because conspiracy theorists like to fantasize about such networks doesn't mean they are not real.From the cults of ancient Rome to the dynasties of the Renaissance, from the founding fathers to Facebook, The Square and the Tower tells the story of the rise, fall and rise of networks, and shows how network theory--concepts such as clustering, degrees of separation, weak ties, contagions and phase transitions--can transform our understanding of both the past and the present.Just as The Ascent of Money put Wall Street into historical perspective, so The Square and the Tower does the same for Silicon Valley. And it offers a bold prediction about which hierarchies will withstand this latest wave of network disruption--and which will be toppled.

How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business


Douglas W. Hubbard - 1985
    Douglas Hubbard helps us create a path to know the answer to almost any question in business, in science, or in life . . . Hubbard helps us by showing us that when we seek metrics to solve problems, we are really trying to know something better than we know it now. How to Measure Anything provides just the tools most of us need to measure anything better, to gain that insight, to make progress, and to succeed." -Peter Tippett, PhD, M.D. Chief Technology Officer at CyberTrust and inventor of the first antivirus software "Doug Hubbard has provided an easy-to-read, demystifying explanation of how managers can inform themselves to make less risky, more profitable business decisions. We encourage our clients to try his powerful, practical techniques." -Peter Schay EVP and COO of The Advisory Council "As a reader you soon realize that actually everything can be measured while learning how to measure only what matters. This book cuts through conventional cliches and business rhetoric and offers practical steps to using measurements as a tool for better decision making. Hubbard bridges the gaps to make college statistics relevant and valuable for business decisions." -Ray Gilbert EVP Lucent "This book is remarkable in its range of measurement applications and its clarity of style. A must-read for every professional who has ever exclaimed, 'Sure, that concept is important, but can we measure it?'" -Dr. Jack Stenner Cofounder and CEO of MetraMetrics, Inc.

Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions


Gerd Gigerenzer - 2013
    But as risk expert Gerd Gigerenzer shows, the surprising truth is that in the real world, we often get better results by using simple rules and considering less information. In Risk Savvy, Gigerenzer reveals that most of us, including doctors, lawyers, financial advisers, and elected officials, misunderstand statistics much more often than we think, leaving us not only misinformed, but vulnerable to exploitation. Yet there is hope. Anyone can learn to make better decisions for their health, finances, family, and business without needing to consult an expert or a super computer, and Gigerenzer shows us how.Risk Savvy is an insightful and easy-to-understand remedy to our collective information overload and an essential guide to making smart, confident decisions in the face of uncertainty.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers


John Kay - 2020
    The insurance industry’s actuarial tables and the gambler’s roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000, no one—not least Steve Jobs—knew what a smartphone was; how could anyone have predicted how many would be sold in 2020? And financial advisers who confidently provide the information required in the standard retirement planning package—what will interest rates, the cost of living, and your state of health be in 2050?—demonstrate only that their advice is worthless.The limits of certainty demonstrate the power of human judgment over artificial intelligence. In most critical decisions there can be no forecasts or probability distributions on which we might sensibly rely. Instead of inventing numbers to fill the gaps in our knowledge, we should adopt business, political, and personal strategies that will be robust to alternative futures and resilient to unpredictable events. Within the security of such a robust and resilient reference narrative, uncertainty can be embraced, because it is the source of creativity, excitement, and profit.

Models.Behaving.Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life


Emanuel Derman - 2011
    The reliance traders put on such quantitative analysis was catastrophic for the economy, setting off the series of financial crises that began to erupt in 2007 with the mortgage crisis and from which we're still recovering. Here Derman looks at why people--bankers in particular--still put so much faith in these models, and why it's a terrible mistake to do so.Though financial models imitate the style of physics by using the language of mathematics, ultimately they deal with human beings. Their similarity confuses the fundamental difference between the aims and possible achievements of the phsyics world and that of the financial world. When we make a model involving human beings, we are trying to force the ugly stepsister's foot into Cinderella's pretty glass slipper.  It doesn't fit without cutting off some of the essential parts. Physicists and economists have been too enthusiastic to recognize the limits of their equations in the sphere of human behavior--which of course is what economics is all about.  Models.Behaving.Badly. includes a personal account Derman's childhood encounter with failed models--the utopia of the kibbutz, his experience as a physicist on Wall Street, and a look at the models quants generated: the benefits they brought and the problems they caused. Derman takes a close look at what a model is, and then he highlights the differences between the success of modeling in physics and its relative failure in economics.  Describing the collapse of the subprime mortgage CDO market in 2007, Derman urges us to stop relying on these models where possible, and offers suggestions for mending these models where they might still do some good.  This is a fascinating, lyrical, and very human look behind the curtain at the intersection between mathematics and human nature.

Financial Accounting


Walter T. Harrison Jr. - 1998
    A specially designed Accounting Cycle Tutorial program is integrated in the first three chapters (icons in the margin point readers to an online program, a free website that accompanies the book). The program includes tutorials, interactive animations, and practice questions that provide readers with additional, beyond the book instruction on the accounting cycle. This book also provides a no password required online practice environment where readers can work on problems that help them master the accounting cycle and gauge their comprehension. A unique Accounting Cycle Pocket Guide is included for readers to use as a handy reference-it illustrates the key steps in the accounting cycle. This book covers the full range of topics in financial accounting: financial statements, processing information, accrual accounting, internal control and cash, short-term investments and receivables, inventory, plant assets, current and long-term liabilities, stockholders' equity, long-term investments and international operations, using the income statement and statement of stockholders' equity, the statement of cash flows, and financial statement analysis. For accountants and employees in accounting departments.

Probability And Statistics For Engineering And The Sciences


Jay L. Devore - 1982
    In this book, a wealth of exercises are provided throughout each section, designed to reinforce learning and the logical comprehension of topics. The use of real data is incorporated much more extensively than in any other book on the market. Consist of strong coverage of computer-based methods, especially in the coverage of analysis of variance and regression. This text stresses mastery of methods most often used in medical research, with specific reference to actual medical literature and actual medical research. The approach minimizes mathematical formulation, yet gives complete explanations of all important concepts. Every new concept is systematically developed through completely worked-out examples from current medical research problems. Computer output is used to illustrate concepts when appropriate.

Problem-Solving Strategies


Arthur Engel - 1997
    The discussion of problem solving strategies is extensive. It is written for trainers and participants of contests of all levels up to the highest level: IMO, Tournament of the Towns, and the noncalculus parts of the Putnam Competition. It will appeal to high school teachers conducting a mathematics club who need a range of simple to complex problems and to those instructors wishing to pose a "problem of the week", "problem of the month", and "research problem of the year" to their students, thus bringing a creative atmosphere into their classrooms with continuous discussions of mathematical problems. This volume is a must-have for instructors wishing to enrich their teaching with some interesting non-routine problems and for individuals who are just interested in solving difficult and challenging problems. Each chapter starts with typical examples illustrating the central concepts and is followed by a number of carefully selected problems and their solutions. Most of the solutions are complete, but some merely point to the road leading to the final solution. Very few problems have no solutions. Readers interested in increasing the effectiveness of the book can do so by working on the examples in addition to the problems thereby increasing the number of problems to over 1300. In addition to being a valuable resource of mathematical problems and solution strategies, this volume is the most complete training book on the market.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy


George Gilder - 2018
    Gilder says or writes is ever delivered at anything less than the fullest philosophical decibel... Mr. Gilder sounds less like a tech guru than a poet, and his words tumble out in a romantic cascade." “Google’s algorithms assume the world’s future is nothing more than the next moment in a random process. George Gilder shows how deep this assumption goes, what motivates people to make it, and why it’s wrong: the future depends on human action.” — Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future The Age of Google, built on big data and machine intelligence, has been an awesome era. But it’s coming to an end. In Life after Google, George Gilder—the peerless visionary of technology and culture—explains why Silicon Valley is suffering a nervous breakdown and what to expect as the post-Google age dawns. Google’s astonishing ability to “search and sort” attracts the entire world to its search engine and countless other goodies—videos, maps, email, calendars….And everything it offers is free, or so it seems. Instead of paying directly, users submit to advertising. The system of “aggregate and advertise” works—for a while—if you control an empire of data centers, but a market without prices strangles entrepreneurship and turns the Internet into a wasteland of ads. The crisis is not just economic. Even as advances in artificial intelligence induce delusions of omnipotence and transcendence, Silicon Valley has pretty much given up on security. The Internet firewalls supposedly protecting all those passwords and personal information have proved hopelessly permeable. The crisis cannot be solved within the current computer and network architecture. The future lies with the “cryptocosm”—the new architecture of the blockchain and its derivatives. Enabling cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, NEO and Hashgraph, it will provide the Internet a secure global payments system, ending the aggregate-and-advertise Age of Google. Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a “great unbundling,” which will disperse computer power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet. Life after Google is almost here.   For fans of "Wealth and Poverty," "Knowledge and Power," and "The Scandal of Money."

Stochastic Calculus Models for Finance II: Continuous Time Models (Springer Finance)


Steven E. Shreve - 2004
    The content of this book has been used successfully with students whose mathematics background consists of calculus and calculus-based probability. The text gives both precise statements of results, plausibility arguments, and even some proofs, but more importantly intuitive explanations developed and refine through classroom experience with this material are provided. The book includes a self-contained treatment of the probability theory needed for shastic calculus, including Brownian motion and its properties. Advanced topics include foreign exchange models, forward measures, and jump-diffusion processes.This book is being published in two volumes. This second volume develops shastic calculus, martingales, risk-neutral pricing, exotic options and term structure models, all in continuous time.Masters level students and researchers in mathematical finance and financial engineering will find this book useful.Steven E. Shreve is Co-Founder of the Carnegie Mellon MS Program in Computational Finance and winner of the Carnegie Mellon Doherty Prize for sustained contributions to education.

Your Road to Wealth Starts Here: A Simple Step-by-Step Plan for Everyone to Get Out of Debt and Stay Debt-Free Forever in 2017


Avery Breyer - 2016
     You’ve seen all the goofy ideas and fads that don’t work. Now it’s time to get back to basics with a simple, time-tested, step-by-step plan that anyone can follow. Arm yourself with the truth about getting out of debt. Knowledge is power and you’re going to get it. Find out: • Whether your mortgage is good or bad (the answer may surprise you!) • About the Power Pay Off Plan (and how Sam saved 20 grand) • The secrets to successfully get out of debt • Where to find the money you need for debt free living • How much money you ought to be putting towards paying off debt • The truth about debt consolidation (including pitfalls to avoid) • How to use insurance to protect yourself from the unexpected • What to do next, once you’ve started on the road to wealth Your student loans, mortgage, car loans, and credit card balances can all be gone with the straightforward strategies you’ll learn in this book. You don’t have to feel stress, shame, or embarrassment over it for one moment longer. You’re going to take control and change your life for the better. You’ll also get free access to The Debt Destroyer. This wickedly good tool will create a customized plan for you to pay off debt and ensure that more of your money stays in your pocket. You don’t have to tackle this alone, and you don’t have to be rich to pull this off. If you want debt help on a budget - with straight talk and no tricks - you’ll find everything you need right here. Debt relief can be yours. Buy this book today and get started. It’s your turn.

Basic Finance: An Introduction to Financial Institutions, Investments, and Management


Herbert B. Mayo - 2011
    The text offers a strong finance foundation focusing on Internet resources and sample number problems, cases, and calculator solutions using a Microsoft Excel appendix. The text introduces the time value of money using three approaches to reinforce the concept--interest tables, financial calculator keystrokes, and investment analysis calculator software created specifically for the Mayo books.

The Two Cultures


C.P. Snow - 1959
    But it was C. P. Snow's Rede lecture of 1959 that brought it to prominence and began a public debate that is still raging in the media today. This 50th anniversary printing of The Two Cultures and its successor piece, A Second Look (in which Snow responded to the controversy four years later) features an introduction by Stefan Collini, charting the history and context of the debate, its implications and its afterlife. The importance of science and technology in policy run largely by non-scientists, the future for education and research, and the problem of fragmentation threatening hopes for a common culture are just some of the subjects discussed.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World


Christopher Steiner - 2012
    It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills—and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These “bots” started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected. In this fascinating, frightening book, Christopher Steiner tells the story of how algorithms took over—and shows why the “bot revolution” is about to spill into every aspect of our lives, often silently, without our knowledge. The May 2010 “Flash Crash” exposed Wall Street’s reliance on trading bots to the tune of a 998-point market drop and $1 trillion in vanished market value. But that was just the beginning. In Automate This, we meet bots that are driving cars, penning haiku, and writing music mistaken for Bach’s. They listen in on our customer service calls and figure out what Iran would do in the event of a nuclear standoff. There are algorithms that can pick out the most cohesive crew of astronauts for a space mission or identify the next Jeremy Lin. Some can even ingest statistics from baseball games and spit out pitch-perfect sports journalism indistinguishable from that produced by humans. The interaction of man and machine can make our lives easier. But what will the world look like when algorithms control our hospitals, our roads, our culture, and our national security? What hap­pens to businesses when we automate judgment and eliminate human instinct? And what role will be left for doctors, lawyers, writers, truck drivers, and many others?  Who knows—maybe there’s a bot learning to do your job this minute.