• Pricing the Future

  • Finance, Physics, and the 300-Year Journey to the Black-Scholes Equation
  • By: George Szpiro
  • Narrated by: Brian Troxell
  • Length: 10 hrs
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (145 ratings)

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Pricing the Future  By  cover art

Pricing the Future

By: George Szpiro
Narrated by: Brian Troxell
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Publisher's summary

Options have been traded for hundreds of years, but investment decisions were based on gut feelings until the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the Black-Scholes options pricing model in 1973 ushered in the era of the quants. Wall Street would never be the same.

In Pricing the Future, financial economist George G. Szpiro tells the fascinating stories of the pioneers of mathematical finance who conducted the search for the elusive options pricing formula. From the broker's assistant who published the first mathematical explanation of financial markets to Albert Einstein and other scientists who looked for a way to explain the movement of atoms and molecules, Pricing the Future retraces the historical and intellectual developments that ultimately led to the widespread use of mathematical models to drive investment strategies on Wall Street.

©2011 George G. Szpiro (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"One of the major intellectual achievements of the 20th century was the theory of option pricing. This is its story, and it’s absolutely fascinating." (Robert P. Inman, Richard K. Mellon Professor of Finance and Economics, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania)
"[A] fascinating historical account.... Those who think finance is a science will be surprised by the serendipitous events that delayed the discovery of the option-pricing formula by 73 years; those who think finance is an art will be shocked by the deep connections between option-pricing, physics, and probability theory." (Andrew Lo, Harris & Harris Group Professor of Finance and Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
"Szpiro’s tale should fascinate readers who follow the markets." ( Booklist)

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Petty details detract from the topic

I am disappointed. A good popularization, I think, should use colorful stories and details to support a strong, informative walk through the topic. The author who dumps in a profusion of trivia, for whatever reason, without careful editing, is using up my precious time to deliver something I didn't ask for. After a strong opening, I found myself in long stretches of petty technicalities and names of various things that do not support understanding (poorly pronounced in the case of oh-so-many foreign words). Each side-story might claim to be interesting, but please be relevant! On the other hand, a good popularization should elegantly walk me into the technicalities of the topic. Here I felt like we went from a slide show of someone's tedious vacation pictures too steeply into the technical content.
By comparison, Emanuel Derman in "My Life as a Quant," for all his digressing and wanderings, displeasing as that could be, rewarded my patience with elegant passages on Black-Scholes and related topics and personalities. When he got onto the subject, he nailed it.

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6 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Interesting story, terrible accents!

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

If you're interested in the history of finance and financial theory, then yes this is a nice soft introduction. The author does a reasonably good job of spicing up the fairly dry material with interesting stories that help place the events in their historical setting.

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

The book is filled with names, terms and phrases from French, Spanish, Latin and other languages. The narrator absolutely butchers the pronunciation of these. I really wish they'd at least given him a language coach for these bits of the book. It would be comical if it wasn't so sad.

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5 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

concerned customer

Bad choices ...Why would you pick a narrator with such horrible french pronunciation when there is so many french terms and names. Thought I could push through it but it is horrible to listen to I started cringing every time Mr Troxell attempted to read the french names,otherwise he is excellent dont know why he took this job. Very poor decision
content is fascinating guess I have to read it myself.

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3 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

A fascinating book

Szpiro is a rare combination, a journalist, a story teller and a mathematician. For a person such as myself with with some mathematical background, i appreciated the simplified explanation of statistics. His lively history and anecdotes make it a good read for the general reader, anyone who would like something stimulating and different. Brian tried hard to deal with the French and German quotations.

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3 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

awesome book

coming from an engineering background I found this book extremely insightful. highly recommend for anyone interested in finance.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

This quant gives it 4 stars!

This was a really great book in particular for those that are intrested in understanding the history and importance of quantitative finance in today's world. I throwing enjoyed the history and the explanations and applaud the author for doing truly great research. I only wish there were more to the criticisms of the black scholes model and gaussian distributions but this is still an incredibly solid work!

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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great book

well written and narrated. quite insightful. more explanation of square root law woulde be nice

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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Loved it

Great walk through the history of the options market. Enjoyed it , confirmed something and learned something.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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A great listen!

The author presents a fantastic marriage of finance, scientific pursuit, and historical link between them that many would overlook!

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Quite Intresting!!

This book gives a good inside on futures pricing. I would suggest it to all..

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