A Man for All Markets

My mother had been carrying on an affair with the husband of the family with whom we had originally stayed when we visited California for the first time during the summer before Pearl Harbor. Only recently did I learn from my brother that the affair started then, and that when my father eventually discovered it, this led to the divorce.

In 2014, Forbes ranked him as the 134th richest American, at $3.8 billion. One of his hires was Jeff Bezos, who, while researching business opportunities in 1994 for Shaw, got the idea for an online bookstore and left to start a company called Amazon.com. At $30 billion in 2014, Bezos was the fifteenth richest American.

The government released a list of more than thirteen thousand past and present Madoff account holders, ranging from hundreds of not very rich Florida retirees to celebrities, billionaires, and nonprofits such as charities and universities. If these legions of investors were easily gulled, often for decades, what does this swindle (and others) say a

The number of households worth at least $1 million was thought to be about ten million in 2015. With so many millionaire households, the goal of becoming one of them looks within reach. To see what might be done, imagine you’re an eighteen-year-old blue-collar worker with no savings and no prospects. What if, somehow, you could save $6 a day and bu

A young reporter for the Post named Tom Wolfe followed up after my talk with an interview. The Post ran his story, “You Can So Beat the Gambling House at Blackjack, Math Expert Insists.” He was curious rather than skeptical, sympathetic but probing. Wolfe later became one of America’s most famous authors.

How hard is it to count? The more I practiced, the better my times, and I found that if I was able to count one deck in twenty to twenty-five seconds I could easily keep up in any game I was in, so I simply checked to be sure I was up to this standard each time before I played.

While at New Mexico State, I invested money from book royalties and gambling winnings in stocks. But I was ignorant of the market as well as unlucky. The results were poor. I wanted to do better. Investments presented a new type of uncertainty, but the theory of probability might help me make good choices.

Politicians, dimly aware of the awesome power of compound growth, have in many jurisdictions passed laws against perpetuities to prevent the enormous concentrations of wealth that might arise from investments compounding without limit. On the other hand, some states and counties welcome perpetual trusts, being more interested in deriving revenue fr

With six chambers, only one of which is loaded, the chance of firing the cartridge would seem to be one in six. But for a properly lubricated and maintained weapon held upright with the cylinder parallel to the ground, gravity and the weight of the cartridge will cause the full chamber to tend to end up near the bottom, provided the cylinder is all