Ashish Gupta

Writing

These days most of my writing is about one idea: the quantitative tools Wall Street uses to measure performance and risk shouldn't be reserved for Wall Street. Further down are older essays on learning, focus, and how people think, from my PhD years and earlier.

The book

Cover of Improving Performance and Risk: An Actionable Guide For the Rest of Us

Improving Performance and Risk: An Actionable Guide For the Rest of Us

A brief, non-math guide to Wall Street quantitative techniques.

Most investors judge an investment by one number: how much it went up. Professionals look at performance and risk together, and size their positions accordingly. This guide explains those ideas in plain language, with charts and real examples from stocks, indexes, gold, and crypto, and without requiring any math.

You don't need to understand how an engine works to drive a car. In the same way, you don't need statistics to benefit from what quantitative finance has learned.

Read Part A (PDF, 2018) The updated guide on EasyCompare

"To democratize Wall Street investment technology for mainstream investors and make it super-affordable, so that all mainstream investors can benefit, not just Wall Street professionals."

What it covers

Part A (published December 2018):

Part B (in progress):

Sample page: How the Experts Do It, Balancing Reward with Risk, with a chart comparing two investments of equal return and different volatility
A sample page. Two investments end with the same return, but one took twice the risk to get there.

From book to tools

The ideas in the book now live in free, interactive form in EasyCompare and BetterThanSPY, part of my quantitative investing initiative. Instead of static tables from 2018, you can see reward versus risk, volatility, and drawdowns for any stock or ETF, updated daily.

Essays, 2007 – 2009

From Diary of a Wannabe Intellectual, the blog I kept during and just after my PhD. Mostly about psychology, productivity, learning to swim as an adult, and what I was noticing after moving into finance.

2009

2008

2007

Undergraduate essays