The title is meant to convey the message that many problems in mathematics can be solved using elementary tools, more of a street fighting kind than some heavy weight combat type tools. There have been many other books in this genre that highlight the importance of smart guessing and approximations but this book is exceptional in one way - It shows that math problems like solving differentiation, integration, differential equations, etc.

CBOE introduced VIX to measure the market’s expectation of 30-day volatility implied by at-the-money S&P 100 Index option prices. This was in 1993. Ten years later in 2003, CBOE with Goldman Sachs updated the VIX to reflect a new way to measure expected volatility, one that continues to be widely used by financial theorists, risk managers and volatility traders. The new VIX is based on S&P 500 Index and is estimated via averaging the weighted prices of SPX puts and calls over a wide range of strike prices.

Via Eran Raviv: The big plus of non-parametric bootstrap is that it is strictly data-based, without any distributional assumption, the big minus is the same, it is strictly data-based. Possible “futures” for the rate series in green and the red line is the actual realization

Via TradersMag:For the past month, high-frequency trading has been under attack. The first volley came on a Sunday night in late March, when author Michael Lewis, introducing his new book Flash Boys on the news magazine program 60 Minutes, delivered the most perfectly succinct of all headline-grabbing comments. “The markets are rigged,” he told correspondent Steve Kroft, implying that high-frequency traders front-run the market and are cheating ordinary investors. Since then, the imagery used to battle HFT has only grown more fanciful and over the top.

I am a big fan of Literate programming. Seeing a course being offered on Coursera picked my interest. The whole lecture series comprises 4 lectures, each spanning an hour each. So, spending 4 to 5 hours on something that I had already learnt felt like a waste of time. However I realized that mind plays tricks on us and always gives us an illusion of mastery over something just because we are familiar with the topic.