Victor Niederhoffer - The Blowup Artist

There is a fascinating article in The New Yorker by John Cassidy entitled "The Blow-Up Artist - Can Victor Niederhoffer survive another market crisis?" which recounts Victor's most recent financial "blow-up", in the context of his entire life-story, to date. I had read his book, The Education of a Speculator, which is very interesting, but ultimately not very useful from an investment perspective other than as cautionary tale of what to avoid. The article is a shorter reminder of the same story. In theory, we are supposed to learn from the kind of mistakes that resulted in Victor's 1997 financial "blow-up", but even though he did bounce back nicely, his mini-empire was one of the casualties of this Summer's financial turmoil.

He maintains an eclectic blog site entitled Daily Speculations - The Web Site of Victor Niedhofer and Laurel Kenner: Dedicated to Value Creation, Ballyhoo Deflation, and Applying the Scientific Method in Finance. His latest contribution, Complex Variation, dated October 11, 2007:

I've been studying complex variables lately because I find the imaginary very important these days, and I had to brush up on them for one of my daughters.

It led me to consider the imaginary part of the moves during a day or week, and the real part... (more)

-- Jack Krupansky