What We Read

Let’s talk about our favorite books, watching and listening materials! At FCC, all of us are avid learners and have been that way for the better part of our lives. The amount of learning materials including books, podcasts, and educational videos that we have consumed over the years is huge. Following are some samples of materials that our team has liked. Each of these books, courses, podcasts, and videos have educated, influenced, or moved us in a special way. (Note: The reviews come from our different team members)

Book List

3Blue1Brown’s Math Videos

This course has been an excellent educational journey for me, as I did not have CS experience in my undergraduate...

The Data Structures and Algorithms Specialization offered by UC San Diego on Coursera

This course has been an excellent educational journey for me, as I did not have CS experience in my undergraduate...

Invent & Wander – Jeff Bezos

Invent & Wander delves into the lifelong philosophy of Jeff Bezos by synthesizing his letters to shareholders and other

Loonshots by Safi Bahcall

In Loonshots, Safi Bahcall aims to “show you how the science of phase transitions suggests a surprising new way of...

Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

Stolen Focus explains why our attention spans have been dwindling for decades, how technology accelerates this worrying trend

The Adventures of Feluda by Satyajit Ray

These books are a collection of short stories written by Satyajit Ray. He was a famous Bengali author

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

This book is a scientific exploration of what traits led to the dominance of Homo sapiens and how we have

Business Breakdowns Podcasts

This podcast series provides detailed business breakdowns on a number of very interesting businesses

The Incerto Series by Nassim Nicolas Taleb

This series of books are 5-volume philosophical essays on uncertainty written by Nicholas Nassim Taleb

Atomic Habits by James Clear

This book was a vivid read and a great primer on the basics of options, including the drivers of value

Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives by John C. Hull

This book was a vivid read and a great primer on the basics of options, including the drivers of value

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman

In this book, Derman shares his journey from being a theoretical physicist to becoming a quantitative analyst on Wall Street

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin

"Clean Code" is a must-read for developers who want to elevate their coding skills and produce software that is clean,...

Warren Buffett’s Letters and Shareholder Meetings

Listening to Warren Buffett in Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder meetings and reading his letters is nothing short of a revelation

Linear Programming by Robert J. Vanderbei

Includes developing cutting-edge quantitave models and conducting innovative investment research Book 1

Essentials of Stochastic Processes by Richard Durrett

This book covers Markov chains in discrete and continuous time, Poisson processes, renewal processes

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

What I really liked about the book is Vanderbei's ability to connect linear programming to diverse fields. Whether you're interested...

Deep Learning

This book stands as a cornerstone in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning

Favorite Technical Papers

During the course of our day or day work, our team consumes vast amounts of technical papers, literature reviews, and blogs.
They are not only helpful to keep abreast of progress in the fields of machine learning, investment, AI, and computer science, but also to stimulate ideas.

Here are a few papers that our team has enjoyed reading and discussing.

Probabilistic Topic Models

Probabilistic Topic Models This is my favorite technical review about probabilistic topic models. Topic modeling is an unsupervised ML technique ...

XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System

XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System Tree boosting is a highly effective and widely used machine learning method. In this ...

The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns

The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns “The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns” is a seminal academic paper written by Eugene ...

Visual and Statistical Thinking

Visual and Statistical Thinking This article examines the statistical and graphical reasoning used in making two life-and-death decisions: how to ...

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases This seminal paper in the field of decision sciences discusses cognitive biases that affect ...

Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market

Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market Why do some songs become hits? This is a ...

Buffett’s Alpha

Buffett’s Alpha This is a paper with very good insights aided by a lot of empirical analysis. Berkshire Hathaway has ...

Random Forests

Random Forests The paper “Random Forests” by Leo Breiman, published in 2001, introduces the Random Forest algorithm, a powerful ensemble ...

Clustering, Imputing, and Forecasting Multivariate Time Series

Clustering, Imputing, and Forecasting Multivariate Time Series Multivariate time series is a concept common in the real world. For example, ...

Copula

Copula A copula is a multivariate cumulative distribution function for which the marginal probability distribution of each variable is uniform ...

MIDAS Regressions

MIDAS Regressions A MIDAS (mixed-data sampling) regression is a direct forecasting tool that can relate future low-frequency data with current ...

Books

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Favorite Technologies

Our team uses a variety of tech stack, algorithms, packages and computing resources. Some of our favorites are listed as follows.

Spark

Apache Spark is an open-source distributed computing system that is designed for big data processing and analytics.

Hadoop: HDFS + MapReduce + YARN

Hadoop is an open-source framework designed for distributed storage and processing of large-scale data sets.

Exception Handling

It is possible to anticipate certain failure conditions for programs and deal with them appropriately.

Nohup

In Linux systems, to run any program in the background and detach it from the screen, we can use Nohup and also look...

Pandas

Pandas is an ever powerful datatable manipulation package. I use it very frequently for my day-to-day work.

Prophet

Prophet is a procedure for forecasting time series data based on an additive model where non-linear trends...

GluonTS

GluonTS is a toolkit that is specifically designed for probabilistic time series modeling, and is a part of the...

Looker Studio/BigQuery/BI Engine

These are very useful to build a lightning fast, interactive dashboard with no coding on data that run into billions...

Statsmodels

Statsmodels is a powerful and comprehensive Python module for statistical modeling and analysis.

Bigquery

Querying massive datasets can be time consuming and expensive without the right hardware and infrastructure.

PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library

This package makes working with deep learning tools a breeze. It is brilliantly written and well constructed.

CVXPY

CVXPY is a Python-embedded modeling language for convex optimization problems. It allows you to express your...

Arrow, Polars and ADBC

Apache Arrow provides a language independent columnar memory format thereby making most analytic operations more...

Favorite Technologies

Our team uses a variety of tech stack, algorithms, packages and computing resources. Some of our favorites are listed as follows.