Name: A Man for All Markets
ISBN: 9780812979909

A Man for All Markets

The incredible true story of the card-counting mathematics professor who taught the world how to beat the dealer and, as the first of the great quantitative investors, ushered in a revolution on Wall Street. A child of the Great Depression, legendary mathematician Edward O. Thorp invented card counting, proving the seemingly impossible: that you could beat the dealer at the blackjack table. As a result he launched a gambling renaissance. His remarkable success—and mathematically unassailable method—caused such an uproar that casinos altered the rules of the game to thwart him and the legions he inspired. They barred him from their premises, even put his life in jeopardy. Nonetheless, gambling was forever changed. Thereafter, Thorp shifted his sights to “the biggest casino in the world”: Wall Street. Devising and then deploying mathematical formulas to beat the market, Thorp ushered in the era of quantitative finance we live in today. Along the way, the so-called godfather of the quants played bridge with Warren Buffett, crossed swords with a young Rudy Giuliani, detected the Bernie Madoff scheme, and, to beat the game of roulette, invented, with Claude Shannon, the world’s first wearable computer. Here, for the first time, Thorp tells the story of what he did, how he did it, his passions and motivations, and the curiosity that has always driven him to disregard conventional wisdom and devise game-changing solutions to seemingly insoluble problems.

What Hacker News says

johnvanommenFeb 2026

This is such a loaded question.

Because the fundamentals are basic:

Creating money out of thin air generally creates inflation, because theirs is more currency chasing the same amount of assets.

But the Devil is in the details, because there are hundreds of currencies, one currency can be exchanged for another, and interest rates vary all over the world.

Then once that starts to make sense, you open up a box called “derivatives,” and now the complexity just went off the charts.

I only need to understand it in the context of loans on assets, so I can do the math in my head or in excel. Occasionally I’ll vibe code this stuff in Python.

Because I’m not diving into the deep end of complexity, the books I absolutely LOVE are the cautionary tales of when it all blows up.

In that respect, I think “when genius fails” is an all timer.

Nearly everyone knows about the Great Recession, and the depression and the dot com bubble.

But the collapse of Long Term Capital Management was the canary in the coal mine.

LTCM blew up for all of the most predictable reasons, and as the name implies, nearly everyone involved in LTCM were at the top of their game.

Another book that is more folksy is “a man for all markets“, a book about the dude who revolutionized stock options, largely due to a fascination with Blackjack!

(The LTCM guys were big time gamblers too.)

https://www.google.com/search?q=a+man+for+all+markets+by+ed+...

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topologieAug 2025

I would highly recommend that you read Mandelbrot's books and Nassim Taleb's books.

For Mandelbrot, I'd recommend starting with The (Mis)Behavior of Markets. For Taleb, maybe start with The Black Swan.

With those books you'll be able to fully understand why even if/when AI becomes sentient, it will still not help avoid blow ups.

(One reason among many others is, for example, that there are things that cannot be properly forecasted, no matter how hard you try or how advanced your model is, doesn't matter, there's a limit to what we can know and what we can't know about the future...)

Extra: Check out also Thorp's A Man for All Markets.

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FarhadGMay 2024

I recently went through two books: (1) Fortune's Formula and (2) A Man for All Markets. They both impressed upon me a deep appreciation for Shannon's brilliant mind.

Curious if there are any great resources/books you'd recommend on Information Theory.

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SirLJMar 2024

If someone is interested in all this, I would strongly recommend looking into Ed Thorp, he discovered pretty much the same thing earlier, but instead of publishing, he made money with the knowledge...

Great book about all this, 2017 Autobiography: "A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market"

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ivancheDec 2023

"A man for all markets" by Edward O. Thorp - a remarkable story of a brilliant mathematician from the Great Depression to beating Las Vegas casinos by card counting to practically becoming founding father of quants and beating Wall Street.

"The ultimate ETF guidebook" by David Stevenson & David Tuckwell - still reading but the book that goes deep into ETFs, way (and I mean way) above laconic "oh just invest in S&P500 and forget it" approach.

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abawanyDec 2022

He wrote the foreword to Dr. Thorpe's book and it was just a rant against 'academia'. Reading the book, A Man for all Markets, showed that academia was, imo, a foundation for his success and the basis of his successful investment ventures, with some notable reasons that caused him to exit his tenured position. The foreword was imo pretty much a non-sequitur and did not improve an otherwise excellent read.

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