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 大约$40K的Cash想作些投资，有什么好的建议吗？ |
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大约$40K的Cash想作些投资，有什么好的建议吗？ -- 蓓蓓姐姐 - (210 Byte) 2005-12-07 周三, 02:14 (1273 reads) |
ceo/cfo
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作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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Gambling has a bad moral reputation. Losing hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of dollars in the vice dens of Las Vegas can blacken the reputation of even the most upstanding Republican like William J. Bennett (the professional moralist and author of "inspirational" tomes like The Book of Virtues).
Gambling not only fascinates Republican prigs but has also casts a spell over mathematicians for hundreds of years. The development of early statistics and probablity theory came from gambling. Great mathematicians like Claude E. Shannon, the father of information theory, were intrigued by roulette, poker and blackjack. Herbert Yardley, one of the fathers of American cryptography was an avid poker player and the author of the book The Eduction of a Poker Player (Simon and Schuster, 1957).
One of the most famous mathematicians who developed a lifelong fascination with blackjack and the mathematics of risk is Ed Thorp. In 1961 Thorp was a newly minted Phd hired as a lecturer at MIT. He wrote a paper titled Fortune's Formula which he presented at the American Mathematical Association yearly meeting. This paper described some of Thorp's early blackjack models, which he ran on an IBM 704. The following year Thorp wrote Beat the Dealer (Random House, 1962, revised edition 1966) which lays out the foundation for blackjack card counting stratagies. This book has been a best selling classic and is still in print.
Over thirty years later, blackjack and card counting live on at MIT. Bringing Down the House is a fascinating story of the rise and fall of a group of MIT students who are part of a blackjack group that won millions of dollars over a period of about four years. The main character in the book is "Kevin Lewis" (all names in the book have been changed). In 1994 Lewis' was an MIT pre-med when he moved in with two roommates who were MIT ｄｒｏｐouts. His roommates did not seem to have jobs, but appeared to have lots of money. At one point Lewis worried that they were involved in the drug trade. Eventually Lewis' roommates take him to Las Vegas and give him a taste of the Las Vegas high roller lifestyle. They later recruit Lewis for their blackjack group and introduce him to the leader of teh group "Micky Rosa". Rosa, who is a decade or so older, was MIT instructor who gave up the academia for the life of a professional blackjack player. Rosa is a brilliant mathematician and card counter, whose professional card counting life lasted until he was banned from the casinos. Although Rosa can no longer enter the casinos himself, he and a set of unnamed investors provide the stake for the blackjack team, which Rosa organizes and coaches.
Once a casino has identified a person as a card counter, the person's name and likeness are immediately circulated on something called the Griffin list, which, I am told, has the power to keep people out of casinos for the rest of their lives.
[...]
For if a card counter should slip up and reveal that he is being paid to make bets with a bankroll of his own and other people's money, his card-counting career will come to an abrupt end.
This is what happened to Semyon Dukach: He became so good at counting cards and won so much money that the casinos eventually caught on to his technique. Once Dukach's likeness was circulated on the notorious Griffin list －－ a report compiled by Las Vegas detective agency Griffin Investigations Inc. －－ he had no choice but to hang up his aces and look for a new game.
The Venture Cafe by Teresa Esser
The MIT blackjack groups won millions of dollars over the time period covered in Bringing Down the House. It should be no surprise that the casinos wish to avoid these kind of losses. In Bringing Down the House the nemesis of the MIT blackjack groups is called Plymouth, which is almost certainly Griffin Investigations. Once Griffin started successfully identifying card counting teams, casinos were more or less universally forced to subsribe to Griffin's service. I suspect that virtually every casino in the world subscribes to the "Griffin List". Any casino that does not become a Griffin customer runs the risk of losing to card counters who get kicked out of casinos that do subscribe to Griffin. Like the government intelligence community, Griffin is a very secretive organization. As a private company they do not report their profits, but I would guess that they are very profitable. Apparently this has allowed Griffin to invest in advanced surveillance technology. Griffin has also invested the development of a face recognition system they call Indix.
Griffin works in the same environment as companies like Systems Research and Development, which developed the NORA database system which uses graph (or network) techniques to find "non-obvious" relations (for more on Systems Research and Development, see Entrepreneur Offers a Solution for Security-Privacy Clash by Don Clark, The Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2004).
Steven Levy, the technology writer for Newsweek, wrote a similar article on SRD (see Geek War on Terror, Newsweek, March 22, 2004). In an example of sloppy journalism, Steven Levy parrots into the Casino view that anyone who might diminish casino profits, even through legal means like card counting, must be a bad guy:
Since Jonas's livelihood is fingering bad guys －－ the Las Vegas firm he founded, Systems Research and Development (SRD), helps casinos shut their doors to mobsters and card counters
Ben Mezrich is a novelist, not a journalist and it shows in Bringing Down the House. Griffin (a.k.a. Plymouth) plays the dark heavy in the book. It is not clear that Ben Mezrich ever found out much about Griffin Investigations beyond the fact that they are the bete noir of card counters. A Google search would have shown that Griffin Investigations is an interesting company. The "chief investigator" of Griffin Investigations is Beverly Griffin, who apparently founded the company with her husband Bob.
The story behind Griffin would probably be an interesting one. A journalist would have wondered how the company started and grew to become a provider of high tech. surveillance technology to most of the gambling business. To a novelist a side story about Griffin, a small company built through the hard work of a husband and wife, could have ruined the character of "Plymouth", the dark nemesis that eventually forced Kevin Lewis and the MIT blackjack teams out of the casinos. Largely because of the fascinating story, Bringing Down the House is a good book. But this lack of depth is what keeps it from being great.
Once on a film set, Paul Newman asked him [Ed Thorp] how much he could make at blackjack. Ed told him $300,000 a year. "Why aren't you out there doing it?" Ed's response was that he could make a lot more doing something else, with the same effort, and with much nicer working conditions and a much higher class of people. Truer words were never spoken. Ed Thorp took his knowledge of proabillity, his scientific rigor and his money management skills to the biggest casino of them all, the stock market.
In for the Count by Dan Tudball, Wilmott Magazine
The personality traits that make a person feel comfortable taking a risk on a high-tech start-up are similar to those that make one comfortable with other forms of gambling, including blackjack.
The Venture Cafe by Teresa Esser
For those with a taste for risk, there is no casino like the modern finanical markets where the opportunity for profit and loss is far greater than the gaming tables of Las Vegas. The rewards that are available at investment banks and hedge funds attract some of the smartest people in the world. This was eventually the path followed by Ed Thorp.
While a professor at U.C. Irvine Ed Thorp became interested in the stock market. In 1967 he published Beat the Market: A Scientific Stock Market System which describes stratagies for trading stock warrants. Warrants act like stock options, but with a longer term. Thorp developed an early version of what has become known as the Black-Scholes option pricing formula. In 1969 Thorp left academia, never to return. He founded an investment fund, based in Long Beach, California, initially called Convertible Hedge Associates, and later renamed Princeton Newport Partners. Princeton Newport Partners was one of the most consistently successful hedge funds in history, making Thorp a very wealthy man.
The members of the MIT blackjack teams were young and much of their story remains ahead of them. I can only wonder how many of them will find their way to Wall Street or start-up companies.
The story in Bringing Down the House is so compelling that the book is a page turner, despite Ben Mezrich's writing. Before writing Bringing Down the House he wrote fiction and this is his first non-fiction book. Perhaps the awkward and stilted writing style in Bringing Down the House is due to Mezrich's lack of experience as a journalist.
作者：ceo/cfo 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 大约$40K的Cash想作些投资，有什么好的建议吗？ -- 蓓蓓姐姐 - (210 Byte) 2005-12-07 周三, 02:14 (1273 reads) - Making money in Vegas or on Wall Street?? My two dollars. The following is -- ceo/cfo - (9018 Byte) 2005-12-07 周三, 06:59 (354 reads)
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