I'm roughly 150 pages in since it was delivered yesterday afternoon and I rather enjoy it.  I find that it reads a lot like a novel and I rather enjoy it.  The last financial book that I read that I enjoyed this much was "Rich Dad Poor Dad."  Well done.

I was looking into investing in penny stocks myself during some of what you went through.  I remember looking on message boards and yet I couldn't quite discern what was going on.  It didn't seem reasonable that a stock would rise and fall in such a short period of time and had you only been one of the few to have heard the news before hand you could have enjoyed the short lived earnings.  Yet, you hit the nail on the head.  It is all fluff.  Why I never put two and two together I'll never know.

I remember that kid that used message boards, arguing with himself under various names, to drive up stock prices.  As I remember, he made somewhere near $360,000 but was court ordered to pay most of it back.  I wonder what ever happened to that kid.

I can relate to what you went through with your baseball cards as I went through a similar period with comics.  The magazine that I used to gauge the value of my comics was called Wizard.  LOL, hopefully my comics are still tucked away in my dads attic somewhere waiting for me to collect them.  They are probably fairly worthless, though, for the same reasons you mentioned about your baseball cards; they aren't exactly rare.

In a short portion of your book you talk about some time you spent in Orlando and partying with some fraternities.  I'm curious, being that I live in Orlando, were you partying with the crowd from Rollins or from U.C.F. or some other college?  I may be a little presumptuous, but I tend to think the Rollins college kids are a bit more your speed.  By that, I simply mean that they tend to be from wealthy backgrounds and you were trying to build your hedge fund at the time.  I doubt that the typical middle class family that sends a child to U.C.F. would be what you were looking for, nor do I see many people coming from Connecticut to attend U.C.F.

One thing I found humorous whilst reading your book was how torn I was with my inner emotions.  Particularly the portion where you were stuck on the boat and the internet connection was out and you were trying to skip all of the people in line to use the phone.  Half of me thought that was rather spoiled bratty behavior and the other half of me sympathized with your plight.  After all, you had a small fortune on the line and they were making seemingly useless phone calls.

There seem to be a few small errors in the book, but nothing too severe.  A simple grammatical error and a paragraph that lacked an indentation seem to be about the worst of it.  See page 54 for the indent I was referring to. 

Now, I'm no expert in English, but, one thing I perceived to be a grammatical error can be found on page 136.  The sentence reads as follows: "I would've shorted more, but this stock was much less liquid than IIJI, so I couldn't risk getting caught in any potential short squeeze."  I think you used one too many commas there.  In theory, as I understand it, you should be able to remove the portion of the sentence between the commas and be left with a complete sentence.  You obviously cannot with that one.  "I would've shorted more but, this stock was much less liquid than IIJI so I couldn't risk getting caught in any potential short squeeze" seems to make more sense.  Then again, I could be entirely mistaken.  Nothing to get your pants in a twist over.

All in all, I'm enjoying the book.  I'll let you know what I think when I'm done.