The purpose of this post is to summarize the various stories mentioned in this book. This write up is a result of a marathon writing on this weekend. Actually it took more time to write than read the entire book!. In the process of summarizing, I have tried listing down some of the statements/remarks/suggestions(under the heading, learning’s) made by these quants that are worth pondering upon. David Leinweber David Leinweber graduates from MIT and Harvard with a bachelors and PhD respectively.

Nowadays I start most of my work with a .Rnw document that I convert later in to a LaTeX file. Since .Rnw keeps a running log of the trials / mistakes encountered in a project, it serves as a good summary document of the time spent on data analysis , model building , visualization , back testing etc. One big limitation that I was facing in preparing .Rnw documents was that I had forgotten most of the LaTeX syntax that I had used 4 years back.

It’s a small world. I was talking to one of my colleagues about Kathalaya and he mentioned that his sister had attended some workshop at Kathalaya. At the same time, he mentioned about another NGO that badly needed a web presence. So, I just took some time out this week and designed a preliminary site for the NGO. The NGO goes by the name North Bengal Council for the Disabled ( NBCD) and Prerana is one such initiative under NBCD.

Via BusinessWeek: Unaggressive bets have led Aditya Puri’s bank to 10 years of 30 percent profit gains Aditya Puri avoids e-mail, doesn’t carry a mobile phone or wear a watch, and goes home for lunch most days. That hasn’t stopped his HDFC Bank (HDB) from becoming the country’s second-biggest lender by market value, after government-owned State Bank of India. “Banking is a simple business,” says Puri, 61, in an interview in his sparsely decorated office at the bank’s Mumbai headquarters, sunlight streaming onto the bare tiled floors.

Fresh in my mind are the various images/opinions/numbers/people from the book, “Boomerang Here is an article that I stumbled upon, that says EU’s collapse is imminent. Via CBS News : With Italy sinking rapidly into financial chaos, the eurozone’s 17 finance ministers scrambled Tuesday to find enough money to give their rescue fund a veneer of credibility and world markets some reason to believe their embattled currency won’t break up.