A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market

by Edward O. Thorp

When I was reading or just thinking, my concentration was so complete that I lost all awareness of my surroundings.

For the rest of my life I would meet Depression-era survivors who retained a compulsive, often irrational frugality and an economically inefficient tendency to hoard.

Meanwhile, my nine-year-old eyes followed in detail the Battle of Bataan, reports of the horrors of the Bataan Death March,

My parents were usually gone or sleeping, seldom seeing us or each other. They left my brother and me to raise ourselves. We served ourselves cereal and milk in the mornings. I stuffed peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches into brown bags for our lunches.

I thought about it, then went out and bought a used “tape machine” for what was then the enormous sum of $15, almost three weeks’ income from delivering newspapers. The machine looked like a stubby black shoe box. The lid unclipped to reveal two spindles. It came with a collection of reels of pale-yellow paper tapes. These tapes had short holes for the “dots” and long holes for the “dashes.” You could look at them and read off the code for letters, and thus “read” the tape. The machine wound the tape from one spindle to the other, like the old reel-to-reel high-fidelity music tape players and the later cassette-tape machines. For power, you simply wound up the machine with a crank. It was simple, low-tech, and effective.