I went to see “I’m Not There”, a movie about Bob Dylan’s double. It’s a bit long, but what’s impressive in the movie, besides his…
Comments closedAuthor: Emanuel Derman
Kerry Back’s excellent Springer book entitled “A Course in Derivative Securities” makes a remark about the numeraire/martingale way of looking at options pricing: “It seems…
Comments closedWhen you stay at cheap hotels, you get no cotton robe at all, not even a synthetic one. When you stay at good hotels, they…
Comments closedGAIM recently had an all-day conference in New York City on hedge fund replication. There are three approaches, and I’m a little sceptical/skeptical about them…
Comments closedI heard a talk entitled “Financial Engineering: An Oxymoron” by Jim Grant tonight at our NYQF seminar. It reminded me of something I once wrote…
Comments closedis the hobgoblin of little minds. (Emerson). Excuse me, but, on a recent trip I went into the mens’ room at the airport. The toilet…
Comments closedThe New York Times on Oct 3 had an article about the miseries of being a graduate student, and how universities were trying to shorten…
Comments closedOnce I visited a doctor who had a sign in the waiting area saying “Do not arrive 15 minutes before your appointment.” I never did.…
Comments closedIn the past couple of months I visited a bunch of fundamentally driven Long/Short Equity hedge funds. It’s not a very profound observation, but one…
Comments closedA few weeks ago I was part of a sort of sociology workshop about economic valuation under uncertainty. There I listened again to Dr Taleb…
Comments closedNormally I?m a pretty reticent person, but I have to say that I?m quite unabashedly pleased to be here tonight. I?m very grateful to the…
Comments closedIt always seemed to me, and recent occurences seem to confirm it, that most algorithmic trading strategies are long volatility but short volatility of volatility.
Comments closedA lockup period for investment in a hedge fund is a time period after making the investment during which the investor cannot freely redeem his…
Comments closedWall Street Journal, August 2007 In 1985, when I left academia and began putting my physics training to work on Wall Street, I talked eagerly…
Comments closedI was having dinner with someone the other evening who commented that there were many people who didn’t seem talented or industrious when he knew…
Comments closedPeople who haven?t lived and died by financial models often have difficulty understanding how they are used. In physics or engi- neering, a theory predicts…
Comments closedAccording to the Friday June 23 NY Times, “Research Finds Firstborns Gain the Higher IQ,” about three points higher in the eldest child than in…
Comments closedDoug Hofstadter’s book about Godel’s theorem, “I am a Strange Loop”, points out that mathematicians before after Hilbert and Russell and Whitehead thought that in…
Comments closedI keep becoming more aware of contradictions and of the inability of reason to cope with them or reconcile them. On my way to the…
Comments closedSomewhere I once quoted an observation made by Fischer Black in 1994 about the need for judging traders by their reasoning rather than results. Several…
Comments closedI used to detest vulgarity, but that was long ago. Now I don’t mind it too much. In the good sense, vulgarity can be the…
Comments closedWhen you forget skills or knowledge you once used but then neglected, I’ve noticed that they don’t fade away gradually. Some of the physics or…
Comments closedWhat excess return should a fund of funds expect to earn for investing in a hedge fund with an extended lockup? In this paper we…
Comments closedAn amalgam of the answers I liked best came from Umut Gokcen and Mario G. It went something like this, modified a little by me.…
Comments closedI realize it contains lots of inaccuracies and sounds cranky, but I sort of like this article: www.theamericanscholar.org……. I found it on aldaily.com……. The reason…
Comments closedThe epidemic of recent articles in the press about neurolaw and responsibility made me decide to believe in two contradictory ideas: 1. I will treat…
Comments closedThe Brain on the Stand By JEFFREY ROSEN How advances in neuroscience could transform our legal system. ? ? The extent of that revolution is…
Comments closedWhen I worked in firmwide risk I didn’t clearly understand what our job was — control risk, measure risk, whatever? Recently I heard a very…
Comments closed1. From Jim Holt’s review of Michael Frayn’s new book on existence: I like the last parenthetical sentence. “In philosophy, you can be a “realist”…
Comments closedI’m not a basketball fan and I know next to nothing about it. But I was fascinated by this 1972 photograph of Pete Maravich in…
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