Book review: The man who beat every market - Edward O. Thorp

Welcome to Medio's Blog, a new week has come. As usual, on Monday of the week I will review a book, and this week's book is: The man who beats every market by Edward O. Thorp

I learned about this book when watching videos on your channel Thai Pham – a pretty good channel about investing and self-development that I recommend everyone to follow. These are a few motivational channels in Vietnam that I follow. Because most of the channels of teachers who motivate people to get rich in Vietnam are quite boring, mainly to sell courses.

This book is published by Happy Live - Mr. Thai Pham is also a co-founder and one of the translators of this book. Happy Live has quite a few books about investing. Perhaps Mr. Thai Pham is also a stock investor so he focuses a lot on these types of books.

I ordered this book on Tiki because it was recommended that Happy.Live's books are only sold on its own page and Tiki and not in bookstores or other websites. Books from other places are all fake. Everyone also pay attention when buying!

The book is about 500 pages thick and has a hard cover like a thick novel. The paper is smooth and high quality, making the book quite heavy. Although the shape is beautiful, this is something I don't like because the paper material like that makes the book easily become glossy when reading under light, causing discomfort to the eyes. At the same time, it also makes the cost of books higher and these materials, I think, are not very environmentally friendly.

However, I also have to sympathize with the publisher because I have seen many books printed with lighter, more user-friendly yellow paper, and many people gave them extremely low scores because they said the paper quality was poor, even though I found it to be a good experience. better reading experience. It's just that it doesn't look very luxurious...

That's an assessment of the book's format. What about content?

When I heard the introduction of this book from Mr. Thai Pham, I found it quite interesting with content such as instructions from the legendary investor, father of quantitative methods, mathematical genius, beating the casinos. ,... Especially parts like Compound Interest - The 8th Wonder of Humanity, Kelly's formula,...

This is completely true, but perhaps in my mind, I thought that the book would help me towards risk management, capital management,... those are the things I care about, so when I read the book, I felt a bit disappointed because I didn't know what to do. okay as I thought.

The book is essentially an autobiography of Edward O. Thorp, rather than an investment guidebook. We will hear about his life from a young age with his talent when he was able to participate in Math, Physics, and Chemistry tournaments in an outstanding way.

After that, there are the ups and downs of life from being a PhD teaching and researching at the University to applying knowledge of mathematics and physics to researching ways to beat the house in games that other people play. think it's impossible.

The first part of the book I read was a bit dry because Thorp is a mathematician so the writing language is not poetic and the translators also translated in a way that kept the same dry style.

I am not a stock investor so this book is not too suitable. Before buying, I thought I would learn the principles of risk management and capital management to apply to Forex and Crypto investments - two main areas of interest.

Many contents in the book are mainly only suitable for Securities. That's why I say that the book did not meet my pre-purchase expectations. But stock investors will probably enjoy the book more.

The last chapters of the book seem more attractive because they provide more knowledge about interest, risk prevention, what is the opinion of being rich?, giving, etc. of Edward Thorp that I think I can learn from. and apply in life.

In this book, I found one very good thing that the Translator is very attentive in the annotations about the contents of the book: not only the terms but even the events in the book are annotated to Readers can understand better (can quote from documents or Wikipedia). I find it very helpful to help readers no longer need to waste their time looking it up themselves.

Although the book was not what I initially expected, I still learned many lessons from the book, such as Thorp's problem-solving method and Thorp's investment ideology.

A pretty good example from his book about the comparative value of time, money and health that I would like to quote:

“Most people I meet don't care about the relative value of time, money and health. Think of a single worker spending two hours commuting 40 miles from hot and foggy Riverside, California to work in cool Newport Beach for $25$/hour.

If a worker moves from a 12,00$/month apartment in Riverside to an equivalent 25,00$/month apartment in Newport Beach, his rent increases by 13,00$/month but he avoids the 40-hour commute from home to office.

If his time is worth 25$/hour, he will save 1000$/month (25$ x40 per month). Plus driving costs will add 1600 miles. If the operating cost of the car is 50 cents/mile or 800$/month, then living in Newport Beach and saving 40 hours of driving per month will help you gain 500$ (1000$ + 800$ -1300$).

In reality, he only earns 12.5$/hour because of the long commute. Does our employee consider this? I suspect he doesn't, because the extra $13,000/month in rent in Newport Beach is a clear cost in plain sight, a cost that periodically shrinks like a piece of meat, as opposed to the cost of his car. he is less pronounced and may drift from mind.

The report says Americans spend an average of 40 hours a week watching TV. Those people have a lot of “junk time” they can waste in lieu of an exercise program. Five hours of exercise a week can add five years to a healthy life.”

I think this story will change both my and your thinking instead of just considering things that are clearly in sight.

That's my review of the book: "The Man Who Beat Every Market by Edward O.Thorp". Hopefully it will provide more information for you to decide whether to read this book or not?