The engine driving the Kelly system is the "law of large numbers." In a 1713 treatise on probability, Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli propounded a law that has been misunderstood by gamblers (and investors) ever since. — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
"Average" isn't so hot at the race track given those steep track takes. "Average" is pretty decent for stocks, something like 6 percent above the inflation rate. For a buy-and -hold investor, commissions and taxes are small. — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
Samuelson spotted a mistake in Bacheliers work. Bachelier's model had failed to consider that stock prices cannot fall below zero. — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
There is a deep connection between Bernoulli's dictum and John Kelly's 1956 publication. It turns out that Kelly's prescription can be restated as this… — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
“In view of this, it may seem remarkable that anything as complex as a text of Hamlet exists. The observation that Hamlet was written… — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
Expectation is a statistical fiction, like having 2.5 children. — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
“In 1894 Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patents expired. Within a few years, over 6,000 local telephone companies were competing for the U.S. market.” — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of… — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
Bernoulli's real contribution was to coin a word. The word has been translated into English as "utility". It describes this subjective value people place… — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
There were many at Bell Labs and MIT who compared Shannon's insight to Einstein's. Others found that comparison unfair - unfair to Shannon. — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
Carl Friedrich Gauss, often rated the greatest mathematician of all time, played the market. On a salary of 1,000 thalers a year, Euler left… — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
The more improbable the message, the less "compressible" it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon's point: the essence is its… — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
“The stumbling block isn't the certainty effect per se. It's the way that smart people are influenced by mere words, by the way the… — William Poundstone Copy Share Image
