KELLY CAPITAL GROWTH INVESTMENT CRITERION, THE: THEORY AND PRACTICE (World Scientific Handbook in Financial Economics) cover
KELLY CAPITAL GROWTH INVESTMENT CRITERION, THE: THEORY AND PRACTICE (World Scientific Handbook in Financial Economics)
by Leonard C. MacLean, Edward O. Thorp, William T. Ziemba
ISBN: 9789814383134
Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
View on Amazon
We may earn a commission from purchases made through links on this page.
Not ready yet? Get weekly book picks.
kqr · 2025-09-05 · Original thread
Yet this article, like thousand others, don't go beyond binary decisions. Binary decisions are fine for many everyday decisions like figuring out whether to get insurance[1] but the Kelly criterion goes well beyond that[2] without changing the fundamentals: estimate a joint probability distribution of the outcome for each alternative, evaluate E(log X) using it, and pick the alternative for which it is highest.

For a deeper introduction, I recommend the somewhat heavy Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion[3] which is a well-curated collection of papers on the Kelly criterion and its various uses.

[1]: https://xkqr.org/insurance/?wealth=0&offered=0

[2]: https://entropicthoughts.com/the-misunderstood-kelly-criteri...

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/KELLY-CAPITAL-GROWTH-INVESTMENT-CRITE...