Aaron Brown has been involved in finance and speculation for decades - since his college days as a trader and poker player to his current "day job" with the hedge fund AQR Capital Management. In between he was head of mortgage securities for a New York investment bank, a teacher of finance at Fordham and Yeshiva Universities, and a risk management professional at a Who's Who of Wall Street firms including JP Morgan, Citigroup and, most recently, Morgan Stanley.

He is the author of The Poker Face of Wall Street, a book that is part autobiography, part critique of contemporary finance, and part exploration into the world of professional poker, where many of Aaron Brown's ideas about life, creativity, risk and ambition seem to merge. In a brief explanation of what led him to write the book, Brown reflects: "I wanted (the reader) to take my ideas as an integrated whole, not a series of contentions to be evaluated one at a time. I don't expect anyone to accept everything in the book, but I hope everyone who reads it looks at finance, risk and poker a little differently afterwards."

Keith