Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
However many intellectual pleasures a book may offer up, it’s usually your emotional connection to the memoir’s narrator that hooks you in. And how does she do that? A good writer can conjure a landscape and its peoples to live inside you, and the best writers make you feel they’ve disclosed their soft underbellies. Seeing someone naked thrills us a little.
The Art of Memoir
Mary Karr
The linearity of the book’s exposition of the investment process masks the complexities inherent in the portfolio management challenge. For example, asset allocation relies on a combination of top-down assessment of asset class characteristics and bottom-up evaluation of asset class opportunities. Since quantitative projections of returns, risks, and correlations describe only part of the scene, top-notch investors supplement the statistical overview with a ground-level understanding of specific investments. Because bottom-up insights into investment opportunity provide information important to assessing asset class attractiveness, effective investors consider both top-down and bottom-up factors when evaluating portfolio alternatives. By beginning with an analysis of the broad questions regarding the asset allocation framework and narrowing the discussion to issues involved with managing specific investment portfolios, the book lays out a neat progression from macro to micro, ignoring the complex simultaneity of the asset management process.
Pioneering Portfolio Management
David F. Swensen
But given a choice, a country with fewer resources might do better to give priority to plutonium. As of early 1943, Igor Kurchatov was evidently not aware of the existence of such a choice. Then he saw the accumulated NKVD espionage. “He said he still had a lot to clear up,” Molotov remembers. “I decided then to provide him with our intelligence data. Our intelligence agents had done very important work. Kurchatov spent several days in my Kremlin office looking through this data. . . . I asked him, ‘So what do you think of this?’ I myself understood none of it, but I knew the material had come from good, reliable sources. He said, ‘The materials are magnificent. They add exactly what we have been missing.’ ”240 On March 7, 1943, Kurchatov finished drafting a fourteen-page review for Mikhail Pervukhin of the documents and transmissions that Moscow Center had collected.241 He only refers to British material—most of it probably passed by Klaus Fuchs—which almost certainly means that no American technical information had yet come in. But the British knew enough, and Kurchatov learned enough, to transform the Soviet program. “Having reviewed the material,” Kurchatov began directly, “I came to the conclusion that it is of immense value for our science and our country. Its value cannot be overestimated.” The material “shows what serious and intensive research and development work on the uranium problem has been undertaken in England,” Kurchatov explained. It also, he wrote, “provides some quite important reference points for our research, informing us of new scientific and technical approaches and enabling us to skip labor-intensive phases of development.”
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise