The Unrules

Man, Machines and the Quest to Master Markets

By: Igor Tulchinsky

Narrated by: John Lee

Learn from a master of quantitative finance the rules that made him a success.

The Unrules presents the dynamic rules for success in the age of exponential information. Written by Igor Tulchinsky, the trader behind global quantitative investment management firm WorldQuant, this book is more than just another Big Data guide for financial wonks - it's a prescriptive, inspirational book for everyone navigating the tidal waves of the information age.

Data is everywhere, coming at us in a never-ceasing, ever-rising river that threatens to overwhelm us. Tulchinsky reveals, however, how natural patterns underlie data patterns that may dictate life or death, success, or failure. The marriage of man and machines has allowed scientists to explore increasingly complex worlds, to predict outcomes and eventualities. This book demonstrates how to exercise real intelligence by discerning the patterns that surround us every day and how to leverage this information into success in the workplace and beyond.

©2018 Igor Tulchinsky (P)2019 Gildan Media

1/8 substance, 7/8 marketing-fluff-noise

It looks good on the outside. Emigre quant from former USSR, rags to riches, quant-algorithmic finance, even a forward by Michael Milken. But let's analyze. If we go by evidence or numbers, this is threadbare. There are no metrics to tell this fellow's success here. What we get mostly is self-laudatory ads for his organization (with no financial info), plus a stack of motivational cliches. How cliched? for nine-tenths of this, you could sub in any coach of any sport. Let me summarize hours of this: Persist. Work hard. Realize risk exists and things won't stand still for you. Seize opportunities. How many versions of these phrases did I hear? Hundreds. To use the author's fave language, that's called very low signal, high noise. High redundancy. He might be a great quant, but it is impossible to verify here, so maybe he is just a salesman who has jumped the shark (if he ever had something going pre-shark anyway) and is flacking books and website. The impossibility of differentiating, based on what is here, means precisely: low information. He has an exaggerated sense of specialness of his experience (and his potency as an inspirational figure, philosopher and writer, in each of which he is profoundly mediocre) and personal inspirations, but what we get are toss-offs, dregs, low-content generalities. This is no Carl Sagan as an artistic presenter. Any curious adult who has followed the quant-computing world knows every story heard here, about the verifiable path-breakers, from Von Neumann to Turing to Mandelbrot and so on. LIkewise the (I guessed supposed) insights are low-grade and common, on probability, pairs trades, power laws and so on. I wanted to like this book, and bought the print edition before (as happens SO much) audible, without any preview warning, later released is own version. Who is the right audience? I would say a middle-schooler of reasonable (but not stellar) brightness and curiosity who might want to go into quant finance. I am bored, disappointed and put off. It isn't the worst, but it is light years from greatness.

As for the narrator,perhaps in parallel, in any high-ambient noise environment (as I walk sidewalks near cars), the punch and penetration of his voice varies wildly intra-sentence, so it might be slightly grating and three words later, inaudible above mild car noise.