I know one of the people who literally wrote a chunk of the matching engine on one of the larger exchanges. He’s not absurdly rich but a book from him on high performance order book management at scale would absolutely worth a read.
The metaphor is appropriate because quite frequently people who use things to the greatest effect know very little about the implementation or how it actually works.
That's a reasonable argument then, and now I appreciate the metaphor.
If one is interested in the technical details of implementation for technical reasons, I would agree that a brilliant and interesting engineer wouldn't necessarily be in line to profit from their value creation although would be available to discuss mechanics of implementation.
Just on a quick scan we've got Graham, Buffett, Soros, Taleb... those are before I need to go and look up personal net worth for some of the other names. I'd bet on Burton Malkiel having done alright for himself, too.
Graham, Buffett, Soros – sure, ok, although I doubt they're giving away the keys to the kingdom in their books. Buffet himself is notorious for saying that great ideas are proprietary and not to be shared. In the investment world, in stark contrast to the tech community, ideas are as valuable as execution. Even in VC proprietary dealflow is considered to be valuable.
There is actually some controversy as to how much money Taleb made from trading and portfolio management as opposed to writing.
Right, so your argument is what? That no valuable idea is ever written down? Or that no written down idea is valuable? Why would either of these be true?
I see a common fantasy among developers; they want to apply their sophisticated intellect and technical knowledge towards exploiting financial markets. So, my argument is that if this is what one is up to, one is not going to find many valuable ideas spelled out and spoon fed in a book.
But that's a non sequitur. There's no connection between the intent of the reader and the value of the content. Whether the reader is in the right mental state to learn from it is another matter entirely...
