This book introduced me to a new term, ‘disaster tourism’ . People who visit places where financial disasters occur. Michael Lewis goes on one such tour to Iceland, Greece, Ireland and Germany. This book recounts his experiences of the visits and in turn gives a reader some idea of “What the hell is going on in these countries that is causing stock markets to gyrate wildly, investors to panic and making world leaders increasingly edgy?

Books such as ”Brain Rules” are basically meant to be a bridge to understanding some very basic things. A layperson like me does not know much about the brain. I have completely forgotten whatever I have learnt in high school about the anatomy of brain . So, why read this book ? In fact why should anyone read this book? Most of our survival in modern day world depends on our brains.

Stumbled on to a fantastic service called datamarket. One can sign up for free and get up to 100 Million data sets for data exploration. All you need is the url of the dataset to import data in to your programming environment. This service will be tremendously useful when you are learning visualization techniques. Gone are the days when you had to struggle to get time series data. Kudos to the datamarket team

Good quantitative finance can be summed up as the art of leaving things out, plus the art of selecting the right tools. -- Julian Shaw ( Permal Group)