Aaron Brown – The Poker Face of Wall Street

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Exploring the Essential Features of “Aaron Brown – The Poker Face of Wall Street”

The Poker Face of Wall Street 

by Aaron Brown (Author)

Wall Street is where poker and modern finance?and the theory behind these “games”?clash head on. In both worlds, real risk means real money is made or lost in a heart beat, and neither camp is always rational with the risk it takes. As a result, business and financial professionals who want to use poker insights to improve their job performance will find this entertaining book a “must read.” So will poker players searching for an edge in applying the insights of risk-takers on Wall Street.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If you’re looking for tips on becoming a better poker player, you’ve probably come to the wrong place. Brown does cover the game’s basics and shares plenty of stories from his early card-playing days, which include Harvard games with the likes of Scott Turow. But he has much bigger stakes to discuss in this upbeat and entertaining guide. Drawing on his background at Morgan Stanley (where he’s an executive director) and other financial institutions, Brown proposes that “finance can only be understood as a gambling game” and vice versa—and though the material can be rough going for those without some investment training, he’s very convincing once all the cards are laid out. In an extended historical example, Brown shows how the economy of colonial America was jump-started by the introduction of faro dealers into French Louisiana. He sees the current financial market as filled with similar wealth-generating potential and believes “taking risks just makes sense” in such an opportunity-rich climate. Poker, then, becomes a tool for learning how to evaluate and embrace financial risk. Brown’s model is instantly graspable, but so contrary to the conventional wisdom on both economics and gambling that it may well spark debate. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Gamblers, be they poker players or stock traders, often talk in terms of limiting risk, turning a steady profit and keeping their heads down.
Not Aaron Brown, a Morgan Stanley executive director and card player who specializes in quantitative finance. He says the secret to winning is to embrace risk, not avoid it.
Gambling is more than a sucker’s game in which the house wins even when it loses, he says in “The Poker Face of Wall Street.”Gambling lies at the heart of economic institutions, he writes, and the reason is obvious: “In order to win, you must take risk.”
Brown’s book is both a how-to guide for poker players and an analysis of risk-management techniques he learned on trading floors at banks like Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. He convincingly argues that card strategies apply to investing, and he drives his thesis home with real-life examples.
Whether on the Street or on the Strip, Brown steers a course through the choppiest waters in hopes of netting the biggest rewards. Playing it safe is fine for the meek middle classes; he’s writing for nonconformists with outsize egos.
Random Walk

“I’ve never met a successful poker player or trader who didn’t believe he or she was better than everyone else,” Brown writes. If you have that kind of faith in yourself,” it’s impossible to settle for what everyone else has, however comfortable that is in absolute terms.” Besides, he says, risk motivates and creates opportunities for the best people.
Brown couples such arguments with a knack for explaining mind-boggling concepts in a style that’s part Ernest Hemingway, part Burton Malkiel, the Princeton University professor who wrote “A Random Walk Down Wall Street,” the bible of believers in the efficient-market hypothesis. The result is an engrossing look at why humans take risk — and why those who avoid it at all costs tend to lose, both at poker and in life.
Malkiel’s 1973 classic suggests that chance plays a deciding role in financial markets and that a blindfolded monkey can pick stocks as successfully as most portfolio managers do. Many investors have concluded from this that the only sensible course is to plow their money into index funds.
Don’t Despair

Brown has no real beef with indexers; he’s just convinced you can beat the average, even shoot for the moon, by taking on more risk. He juxtaposes, for example, the more than $1 billion George Soros won by betting against the British pound in 1992 with a card player who learns from past hands what an opponent is apt to do next. Past behavior can predict future actions.
You may end up in tight spots, Brown concedes. “The only assets you can count on after a loss are the ones inside you: your character, your talents, and your will,” he says.
What about gamblers whose wagers go massively awry, as they did at Long-Term Capital Management LP? That mess resulted from poor risk management, Brown says.
Far from being a frivolous pastime, poker helped build the U.S., Brown argues. As Americans pushed West in the 19th century, poker games allocated scarce resources in frontier towns, leaving winners with enough cash to start businesses in places that lacked banks.
Gates, Kerkorian

From the Inside Flap

Although you probably don’t want to think of your broker or investment bank as playing games with your hard-earned money, the fact is that gambling lies at the heart of economic ideas and institutions. Not surprisingly, the game most like the financial markets—poker—is hugely popular with financial professionals.

Financial professional and lifelong poker player Aaron Brown knows how fine the line is between risk-taking and ruin. Now, in The Poker Face of Wall Street, Brown enlightens and bedazzles serious risk-takers about the odds and skills underlying their mercurial crafts and shows how the cultures of poker and Wall Street are so easily intertwined. Whether you’re walking the walk on Wall Street or talking the talk on the Vegas Strip, this entertaining book reveals why the modern game of poker and modern finance have more similarities than differences, and what those similarities mean for players at each kind of table.

The Poker Face of Wall Street also:

• Delves into the psychology of finance and the economics of poker
• Explores some of the cutting-edge work being done in these fields and some of the dangerous nonsense to avoid
• Reveals how America’s passion for gamblingat poker and in the markets has shaped the country’s economic success and national character
• Includes author flashbacks in which Brown candidly recalls his triumphs and disasters in high-stakes finance and poker

The Poker Face of Wall Street is a one-of-a-kind book that will show you the real meaning of risk and reward. Financial professionals who want to use poker insights to improve their job performance will find this entertaining book a must-read, as will poker players searching for an edge by applying the insights of risk-takers on Wall Street.

From the Back Cover

Praise for The Poker Face of Wall Street

“Playing high-level poker, trading options, marketing bonds, and being a professor of finance—Aaron Brown has done them all. He shares with us the insights each of these has given him about the others and the lessons he’s learned about life. From John Law to Fischer Black, I enjoyed the characters and the anecdotes.”
—Edward O. Thorp, author of Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One and Beat the Market: A Scientific Stock Market System

“How to be a poker pro and much more . . . a delightful journey through risk concepts with a Wall Street derivatives trader. Brown uses poker concepts as a wonderful metaphor for investment and living life. His enthusiasm for grasping the brass ring of adventure while explaining the role of ‘incalculable risk’ draws one into the experience of the book. A great read and a good manual for understanding risk.”
—Dr. William T. Ziemba, Alumni Professor of Financial Modeling and Stochastic Optimization Emeritus), Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

“Make no mistake, this is a book about economic development as much as poker, and it tells how to win at both gambling games. Experienced poker players and economists will both look at the world with new eyes after hearing what Aaron Brown has to say.”
—Perry Mehrling, Professor of Economics at Barnard College of Columbia University author of Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance

“The Poker Face of Wall Street is packed with useful information about gambling, the life on Wall Street, poker culture, and some of the most interesting people involved in gambling. The book is a great mix of entertaining and nontraditional thinking.”
—Espen Gaarder Haug, Trader, JPMorgan author of The Complete Guide to Option Pricing Formulas

About the Author

AARON BROWN is an executive director at the investment bank Morgan Stanley. He won the Wilmott Award in 2005 as Financial Educator of the Year for his speaking, writing, and activism. He holds degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard (where he played poker with a future world’s richest man and a future president of the United States) and finance from the University of Chicago (where he played poker with three Nobel Prize winners). A well-known Wall Street quant, he is a columnist for Wilmott, the leading journal serving the quantitative finance community. He has been involved in trading, risk management, and portfolio management for Prudential Insurance, JPMorgan, Rabobank, and Citigroup. He is also a serious lifelong poker player who has played with Wall Street tycoons and world champion poker pros.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wiley; 1st edition (March 31, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English

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