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Outliers: The story of Success by Malcom Gladwell
Outliers tries to debunk the theory of “self-made-men”; about how we often associate success with just the personal qualities of individual like intelligence, hard work, courage. The point in the book is that there are many men with same qualities out there but not everyone is as successful. We owe something to our parentage and…
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Confessions of a risk manager
Confessions of a risk manager is a classic article in Economist published around Aug 2007 before all the hell broke loose. This is my second reading of the article after it was published. Looking back now the risk manager’s concerns seem to be justified. CDOs sat uncomfortably between credit and market risk. In the end…
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Loss aversion and trader’s psychology
How professional traders will behave under stress is a very intriguing topic. They were supposed to be taking reasonable decisions under stressful conditions of trading environment where speed is of the essence. The article points out that under extreme stress the analytical part of human brain switches off and the intuitive part of the brain…
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The Black Swan – The impact of the highly improbable (by Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
It is hard to keep this book in any one category, particularly so when the author is a philosopher, a literary essayist and most interestingly a quant trader. The message of this book is the futility of creating complex mathematical models (and in believing them) to forecast future events. The real life is too complex…
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Google's Portal for India elections
The single minded vision of Google is to democratize the information in the world. Every person on this earth should have access to all available public information, no matter where they are. What better way to prove this than this Google initiative in the largest democracy in the world, India. Google search page for Indian…
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Japan's lost decade
Japan’s economy, stagnant for 16 years, is facing challenges quite different than those from US and Europe. There is no housing bubble or credit crunch in Japan. After a decade of stagnant and deflation ridden 90’s, Japan’s economy started improving in early 2003. But this time the industry has wrongly bet that the Yen will…
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iPhone in India
iPhone, a craze here in US, doesn’t seem to be doing well in India, one of the fastest growing cellular markets in the world. Apple did not seem to have done their homework in understanding the local tastes of the consumer before getting in to the market. – India is a pre-paid cell phone market…
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Tools for mind mapping
Although the mind mapping techniques have been around for 30 years I have not heard much about their effectiveness in knowledge assimilation. But I watched my colleagues using it often (especially in trainings). If anything, the technique forces you to organize the information in a logical order from one word. The visual presentation with a…