[Peleg]

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market - John Allen Paulos 2003

http://www.math.temple.edu/%7Epaulos/stockjac.html

This one has some arcane babble, but his recent wounds from being in too deep with WCOM kept pulling him back to pragmatic issues like the largely random nature of stock prices and illusion of fundamental and technical analysis as big money makers, the underlying driver of exponential growth etc. I recommend this book and would love to hear other peoples assessments of it. I think the irony of it is that peak oil basically provides a tremendous investment opportunity to those who understand it because it will strongly shape markets in the next thirty years. The oil price run up has speculation in it, but it also has the most fundamental of relationships driving it, the relationship between energy scarcity and every product produced in the modern world. Commodities are going to be the source of real value growth in the next decade. The stock market will languish as companies try to face inflation and market shares shrink, but the materials underlying every market will become more expensive as costs of production and transport increase. oil dependence is going to make the markets more predictable and therefore create even larger bubbles than we have ever seen in the past. In the end we may see a giant burst happen quickly, if as some suspect oil production is about to make a sudden shift downward as the artificial plateau of the last five years gives way to reality.

[killJOY]

Paulos' book INNUMERACY was a revelation for me.

I was a failure at math; it kept me from going into the sciences in college.

But Paulos showed me that I could still view the world properly, through a mathematician's lens.