Thursday, June 7, 2012

Whales and Martingales

Here's an interesting and easy-to-read article by Jonathan Adler about whales and martingales and other interesting behaviors of the high rollers in our modern world.

As Adler observes, though, what Iksil was doing was more like poker than it was like Geismar's blackjack activity:

Unlike at a blackjack table where the dealer has a fixed set of actions she has to follow, on Wall Street there are other investors looking to exploit other people’s mistakes. Once other investors saw that the Whale left a chance for his investment to go sour, they were able to take actions to exploit this, and caused the event that seemed unlikely to come to pass.

Does it seem that watching-the-ultra-rich is displacing watching-the-movie-stars as the paparazzi's preferred choice nowadays?

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