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This puzzle is one that comes from a game show where behind 2 doors is goat, but behind one is a brand new car. After picking a door, the host reveals a door containing a goat, at which point you must either switch doors, or stay with your choice.
What is the Monty Hall Problem
The collapse of the Residential Real Estate market and the securities attached to the subprime mortgages that fueled the run up of real estate caused this crisis.
What is the Global Financial Crisis (or 2008 Recession)
This term is one you might hear an aspiring investment banker throw around, but they might not actually know what they're talking about. It's often a proxy for Free Cash Flow and is a combination of 4 accounting lines.
What is EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, Amortization)
This artist is famous in leaving politically-charged street art all across the world. He famously had a piece at auction whose frame was actually a shredder, and destroyed his piece when the Sotheby's gavel hit the podium.
This U.S President left the country with a budget surplus after inheriting a weak economy. Despite this, his legacy is marred by an affair he had with a White House intern.
Who is Bill Clinton
This term refers to when a machine learning model (or a trading model) learns the training data too well, and artificially boosts accuracy/performance.
What is overfitting
Investors were so eager for this suffix that one company saw its stock jump 74% in a single day just by adding it to their name.
What is .com (bubble)
This term shares an unfortunate mascot with a famous Schrödinger thought experiment. It describes a brief rally after a pullback, one that ultimately gives way to further declines.
What is a Dead Cat Bounce
This figure skater went viral after performing her exhibition gala to a "Stateside" remix by Pink Pantheress and Zara Larson at the 2026 Winter Olympics. She also skated to "Promise" by Laufey during the games where she earned Gold for the USA.
Who is Alysa Liu
He did not enjoy being president, and called the White House a Prison. He became the first, and so far only president to have become a Supreme Court Justice, also becoming Chief Justice. Despite being the largest U.S President by weight, the stories of him getting stuck in a bathtub were not true.
Who is William Howard Taft
This mathematical formula was originally created for transferring data efficiently and used a brand new field called Information Theory. This formula is more widely known for its applications in optimal bet sizing.
What is the Kelly Criterion
This firm had 2 Nobel laureates on their team, yet fell into the belief of "free money" after levering up 30x on a on a convergence-arbitrage strategy. Their firm famously blew up in 1998.
Who is Long Term Capital Management (LTCM)
This term describes the rare scenario where short-term Treasury yields exceed long-term yields, a phenomenon that has preceded every U.S. recession since the 1950s with few false signals.
What is Yield Curve Inversion (Inverted Yield Curve etc.)
This classical composer composed over 800 pieces in his lifetime, including Requiem in D minor which was left unfinished after he died at 35 years old due to an illness.
Who is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Abraham Lincoln chose him to be his Vice President, despite being of the opposite party, Democrat. He is often rated the worst President in U.S history, being the first President to be impeached, and was only chosen by Lincoln to project unity during the Civil War.
Who is Andrew Johnson
Despite the Black-Scholes model winning the Nobel Prize for revolutionizing option pricing, it's usage as an actual pricing model is very limited due to this key assumption.
What is Constant Volatility
Named after a day of the week, this rapid sell off was the first time in history where automated computer trading caused a major financial crash.
What is Black Monday, 1987
This term, named after a letter in the alphabet, describes a recovery where one segment of the economy rebounds sharply while another continues to decline. It is used heavily to describe the uneven post-COVID recovery between high and low earners.
What is the K-Shaped Economy
This artist painted "The School of Athens" where he inserted himself among the greatest philosophers, thinkers, and artists of the ancient world. Perhaps he knew he would become a great artist himself.
Who is Raphael
He was the only U.S President to have never been elected to either Vice President nor President offices, inheriting a country distrusting of the office. He was also a starting center for the University of Michigan in his senior year and won 2 national championships prior.
Who is Gerald Ford
Hospital A beats Hospital B in every category of patient severity, yet has a lower overall cure rate. This counterintuitive reversal is famous statistical paradox.
What is Simpson's Paradox
In 2021, this family office used total return swaps to build hidden, massively leveraged positions. Its unwind vaporized roughly $20 billion in two days and helped sink a major Swiss bank
What is Archegos Capital
Like dark pools, this term describes trading activity happening away from the official exchange, but here, it's because the security hasn't been formally listed yet.
What is a gray market
This Catalan architect's unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada FamÃlia, has been under construction since 1882. Between 1984 and 2005, seven of his works were declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Who is Antoni Gaudi
This President was blamed for the Panic of 1837, though it struck barely two months into his term and stemmed largely from his predecessor's banking policies. His laissez-faire response drew heavy criticism at the time, though some modern economists argue it was the right long-term call.
Who is Martin Van Buren