Geek paradox
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The Geek paradox, which has been described as “a biological anomaly which reverses the established natural order of all things”, “an abomination before God who created all things bright and beautiful” and “cogent evidence that there is a God after all, and that he is largely as described in the New Testament, since the meek seem finally to be inheriting the Earth”, is a theorem deriving from observations made largely in investment bank habitats and those Silicon Valley coffee emporias beloved of venture capitalists that, in finance at any rate, the small, scrawny guy with the unusual fixation on maths and computers gets the girl, the condo, the Lear Jet and the collection of Maseratis.
Elsewhere, this has come as something of a let-down.
Everything we were taught in school led us to believe that the strong silent types who were incredibly popular, handsome, captained the first XV, led mountaineering expeditions to K2, sang baritone in the Chapel Choir, won the inter-house Tae Kwon Do competition and relentlessly victimised the unfortunate weedy kids who hung out in the computer lab toting 7” floppies with hacked copies of Castle Wolfenstein, misappropriating their lunch money, were the ones in life destined to win, have glamorous wives, beautiful children, and swan about in late-model race-tuned BMW roadsters.
But no: a glance around a trading floor tells quite a different story. Losing a bit of pocket money in one's teens transpires to be quite the formative experience, it seems.
In Finance Fiction mytholody
The Geek paradox is encapsulated in the story of the First Men, Lanchmani foragers from the ancient northern city of Salomoné, in the Nerdal Plains. The most famous of the Lanchmani were Reg Margin and his Carpathian friend Vlad Paripasu, not himself ethnically Lanchmani, but similarly weak, cerebral and cunning, so fitted right in.