"Nerds on Wall Street" Book is out now

It's finally hatched. The book, "Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets" by David Leinweber, with a foreword by Ted Aronson, is now published (Wiley 2009).  

It is available at Amazon and all major booksellers.
The new Nerds on Wall Street website is at http://nerdsonwallstreet.com.

NOWS should appeal to both techies and financial types with a sense of humor.

The whole thing can be searched with Amazon "look inside". Some pieces can be had here:

Chapter 1 - An illustrated History of Wired Markets, featuring never-before published photos of livestock on the floor of the Chicago Merc and the FIrst Nerd on Wall Street.

Table of Contents  Index

Videos from related talks are at the bottom of this post.

I'm gratified to see that some distinguished readers had nice things to say about it on the back cover, and inside.

Praise for "Nerds on Wall Street"

“Leinweber isn’t half as crazy as people said! He foresaw the profound change that wired technology would bring to markets (robots trading millions of shares in six milliseconds). Now he nails the Stupid Financial Engineering Tricks that dumped the markets, and offers his patented, sound insights on how the nerds will help bring us back.”

Jane Bryant Quinn,
Financial columnist for Bloomberg.com and Newsweek
Author, “Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People“

“David Leinweber has been a pioneer in developing and applying advanced technologies in the capital markets. This book is a virtual tour de force survey of many of the key innovations that ‘nerds’ and computational techniques have driven over the past two decades, with key insights on future opportunities in this area. It is a highly engaging, insightful, and entertaining book that will benefit all investors who want to understand the increasingly important role that technology plays in the financial markets.”

Blake Grossman
CEO, Barclay’s Global Investors

“Leinweber leads his readers through a largely unexplored forest, turning over ordinary-looking rocks to reveal hidden colonies of peculiar creatures that feed on moldering mounds of numbers teeming with trailing zeroes. His book is absorbing, instructive, and very, very funny.”

David Shaw
Founder D.E.Shaw & Co.

“Through the lenses of finance “nerds”, Dave Leinweber recounts the quantitative and technological revolution in equity trading. The book is humorously written but it is serious and insightful. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of financial innovation and the evolution of the capital markets.”

André F. Perold
George Gund Professor of Finance and Banking
Harvard Business School

“Finally, a book that rightly honors the pocket-protected, RPN-loving, object-oriented, C-compatible, self-similar Wall Street quant! This is a delightfully entertaining romp across the trading floors and through the research departments of major financial institutions, told by one of the early architects of automated trading and a self-made nerd.”

Andrew W. Lo
Harris & Harris Group Professor
Director, MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering
MIT Sloan School of Management

“David Leinweber is one of the great financial innovators of our time. David possesses a unique combination of expertise in the fields of money management, artificial intelligence, and computer science.”

Blair Hull
Founder, Hull Trading & Matlock Trading

“An important, accessible, and humorous guide to today’s electronic markets. Like Capital Ideas mixed with Being Digital, as told by Steve Martin.”

Frank Fabozzi
Professor in the Practice of Finance, Yale School of Management
Editor, “Journal of Portfolio Management“

“Most new technologies are exploited first by “alpha geeks,” the folks with the skills to push the envelope. This is as true on Wall Street as it was on the web. David Leinweber was one of those alpha geeks, but is also the first to chronicle the innovation process from early adopter to mainstream acceptance.”

Tim O’Reilly
Founder & CEO O’Reilly Media

“NOWS is a thoughtful, funny and comprehensive history of the overlooked role geeks have played in our financial markets from the earliest days of telegraph, to risk management systems in the current credit crisis. The book is an irreverent “I Was There” chronicle of how our financial markets were formed from silicon, savvy and software. Highly recommended.”

Paul Kedrosky
Infectious Greed
Senior Fellow, Kauffman Foundation
Consulting Strategist, Ten Asset Management

“For decades Dave has not only understood more investment technology than anyone, but with patience and a great sense of humor, he has made the effort to explain it to his less tech savvy friends. Nerds on Wall Street is a home run for us all.”

Richard Rosenblatt
CEO, Rosenblatt Securities

“Clear, light language and wry humor mask David Leinweber’s exhaustive compendium of technological innovations for and impacts on asset trading. Leinweber brings an entrepreneur’s experience and an academic’s perspective to financial technology; and has produced the definitive work, as up-to-date as it is encyclopedic.”

David K. Whitcomb
Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Automated Trading Desk
Professor of Finance Emeritus, Rutgers University

“Nerds on Wall Street is a wild, funny ride though the technological changes that underpin modern financial markets. You will find yourself laughing out loud at what could otherwise be a dry subject. And, if you’re not careful, you might even learn something!”

Richard R. Lindsey
Principal, Callcott Group LLC
Chairman, International Association of Financial Engineers

“If you’re interested in what computers are doing with your money, then this book is for you.”

Richard Peterson MD
Managing Director MarketPsy Capital LLC
Author, “Inside the Investor’s Brain“

“In David’s words, the stock market is a “victim not a cause” of the great mess of 2008. It’s refreshing to read a book with such insight during these difficult times. I applaud David Leinweber for this timely masterpiece.”

Bill Aronin
Co-founder Quantitative Analytics, Inc.
Sr. Manager, Thomson Reuters

“Dr. Leinweber continues to be a patron saint of any nerd who stumbles onto Wall Street. Many of his most insightful ideas are here in this book, the utility of which are only matched by the humor of their presentation. As the markets have changed in 2008, the need to collect, process, and understand novel information sources has never been greater. ”

Jacob Sisk
Infoshock, Yahoo

“Thoughtful insights covering trading, investment practice and system design encased in humor by an expert in all four: a good and practical read.”

Evan Schulman
"Father of Program Trading", Founder, Tykhe, LLC

“David is one of the top practitioners in the fields of textual analysis and sentiment and its application to trading. Leveraging “smart” machines to parse and extract signal from massive quantities of textual data is hard, and David’s work has put him at the vanguard of the next wave of alpha generation.”

Roger Ehrenberg
Information Arbitrage
IA Capital Partners

Video Material

There are talks based on parts of the book available on YouTube

--------

"If you had everything Computationally, where would you put it, Financially?" - Google Tech Talk, about 1 hour long.

--------

"Markets & Technology"  Light 15 minute lunch talk,  with many fine pictures of livestock. Nicely broken into four YouTube size snippets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_OdzQrBvGE

1-Introduction

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQt_YsoQ6k4&feature=channel

2-markets

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLxwxIfXrz4&feature=channel

3-technology

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmDB9-7XjOQ

4-computers

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