Critical Eye
Critical Eye is a compilation of articles, items and writings that the staff at Fortress
Trading have encountered and that shed light on the business of trading and
investing. Some are humorous, some are insightful, some are thoughtful but we
believe all are worth reading. We've endeavored to properly credit the authors.
Chicago offers some of the world's best cultural experiences. From the top, The Art Institute of Chicago;
The Chicago Symphony; The Lyric Opera of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art; Steppenwolf Theatre.
Critical Eye is a compilation of articles, items and writings that the staff at Fortress
Trading have encountered and that shed light on the business of trading and
investing. Some are humorous, some are insightful, some are thoughtful but we
believe all are worth reading. We've endeavored to properly credit the authors.
- Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work, NY Times, February 3, 2008.
"As humans, we want to believe that creativity and innovation come in flashes
of pure brilliance, with great thunderclaps and echoing ahas. Balderdash."
- A Different Way of Looking at Stock Prices, NY Times, August 14, 2007.
When Robert J. Shiller and John Y. Campbell were invited to a make a
presentation to Alan Greenspan in 1996, they used this statistic to argue that
stocks were badly overvalued. A few days later, Mr. Greenspan touched off a
brief worldwide sell-off by wondering aloud whether “irrational exuberance”
was infecting the markets. So now you know who to blame.
- How Much Leverage Should You Use? By Ernest Chan, 2006. Particularly
appropriate now as some hedge funds get caught up in the sub-prime
debacle.
- Fooled By Randomness, The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the
Markets, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb clears the mind of old
misconceptions regarding luck and how luck plays out in the markets.
- The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas
Taleb. In Nassim Nicholas Taleb's definition, a black swan is a large-impact,
hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations.
Unfortunately for some market participants, black swans occur more
frequently than we expect. Many say that the LTCM meltdown precipitated
by the Asian currency crisis and Russian default was a once-in-a-lifetime
event - a black swan. If that's true then we've had four once-in-a-lifetime
events in the past twenty odd years, October 1987; LTCM/Asian currency
crisis/Russian default; September 11, 2001; Subprime meltdown of
2007/2008.
- A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel. Some say the entire
multi-trillion dollar indexing industry was built on this book.
Chicago offers some of the world's best cultural experiences. From the top, The Art Institute of Chicago;
The Chicago Symphony; The Lyric Opera of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art; Steppenwolf Theatre.
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