My guest today is William Poundstone, an American author, columnist, and skeptic. He has written a number of books including the Big Secrets series and a biography of Carl Sagan.

The topic is his book Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

• Claude Shannon
• The connection between Al Capone
• The Kelly formula, bookmaking, and the telephone industry
• Bell Labs and information theory
• Why, when betting, if there’s a small chance of losing everything, you will eventually lose everything
• Criticisms of the Kelly criterion
• Ed Thorp, blackjack, and card counting
• Long-Term Capital Management
• Martingale vs. Kelly
• Early development of the Black-Scholes formula

Jump in!

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I’m MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I’m proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show.

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