A review of “A Man for All Markets” by Ed Thorpe

I have long admired Ed Thorpe.

He has been a pioneer in a number of fields, from inventing card counting for Blackjack to the Black-Scholes option pricing formula (which he came up with before Fischer Black and Myron Scholes).

I have also always admired his intellectual honesty – publishing his findings for all to see and learn from. Could you ever imagine the academics at Renaissance Technologies being as open as Ed Thorpe? It would never happen.

Having said that, I was somewhat disappointed with this book.

Firstly, fully one third of the book comprises of the appendices, acknowledgements, notes, bibliography and index. That’s a huge chunk of the book. And I wonder whether all the appendices were necessary.

Secondly, Thorpe has reprinted (verbatim) as chapters in this book, a number of articles that he wrote years ago for Wilmott Magazine. Now these articles cum chapters are very interesting, but I had already read them in Wilmott and felt a little cheated by this.

Thorpe is hardly a household name, he is only really known in card counting and quantitative finance circles. So it follows that many quants will have read his articles in Wilmott and other places and they would be the overwhelming majority of the readers of this book, so perhaps others felt the way I did too.

Thirdly, Thorpe spends way too much of the book talking about his childhood and school days. Nobody is buying the book to read about this. 

As a result of the above, we don’t really get enough space devoted to Princeton Newport Partners (PNP), Thorpe’s legendary hedge fund that was a pioneer in statistical arbitrage.

Any investor who has been around for a while will have “war stories”. Great stories about making or losing large amounts of money (one story I like to tell was of once watching a trader friend of mine make $35,000 in two minutes flat). Other investors love these sorts of stories. But there are really very few “war stories” in Thorpe’s book. He just seems to recount the standard things we already knew from many previously published articles on PNP. I was left thinking that If Thorpe really didn’t have much more to say, why did he write this book?

If you don’t know anything about Ed Thorpe, the book is very good, but for those of us who already knew quite a bit, the book is a little underwhelming. 

None of this diminishes my admiration for Ed Thorpe, he is surely one of the great intellects of the financial world.