Reddit reviews A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market

i have been raving about this for a while - https://www.amazon.in/Man-All-Markets-Street-Dealer/dp/1400067960

> Is there cliff notes for academic papers?

Yeah, a source for simplified articles is the Financial Analysts Journal. Many key papers will be summarized in fairly non-technical fashion for the layperson (or the lay CFA holder at least) after being published in academic journals. Investment bank quant research groups (e.g JPM, Deutsche, Citi) also compile regular summaries of journal articles that are more actionable.

The other source is finance textbooks. Johnny C's book Asset Pricing is fairly non-technical (yeah, it does have equations and you need to know calculus, but it's nothing like say Duffie). These books are more for getting the basics down so you might not get an immediate payoff. They aren't how to manuals on investing, but allow you to understand the journals articles later on. A bit more applied are the books by academics who are also practitioners. These would include Andrew Ang's Asset Management, Ilmanen's Expected Returns, and Pedersen's Efficiently Inefficient. More for fun, Ed Thorpe's book is coming out soon. I would also look for summary or review articles. Here's one by Johnny C on asset pricing with explains all the key points I tried to make earlier (and more).

My top tip though if you are interested in actually applying quant techniques to pick stocks is the new book by Bali, Engle, Murray "Empirical Asset Pricing: The Cross Section of Stock Returns." They will teach you the details of how to actually do the analysis. It makes explicit all the little things that researchers never explain in their papers (like risk adjusting, using Fama MacBeth regressions, t-statistic adjustments, etc).