• “The Brazilian straddle is a portfolio consisting of a load of call options on one side, and on the other side, an air ticket to Brazil. If the market goes up, you collect all the profits on your call options. If the market goes down, you leave the country quickly.”

    — Dan Davies, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World

  • If “active” and “passive” management styles are defined in sensible ways, it must be the case that:
    (1) before costs, the return on the average actively managed dollar will equal the return on the average passively managed dollar and
    (2) after costs, the return on the average actively managed dollar will be less than the return on the average passively managed dollar
    These assertions will hold for any time period. Moreover, they depend only on the laws of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Nothing else is required.

    — William Sharpe, The Arithmetic of Active Management
  • I just finished Rosarita, a novella by Anita Desai. The prose is exquisite — Desai crafts intensely vivid imagery that transported me to places I’ve never physically visited. I enjoyed how she wrote, but the main character felt less developed compared to all the detailed settings. I liked reading it, but honestly, I’m not sure I got the point of the story. This Goodreads review nailed it:
rosarita-review