Somewhere 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 closedAuthor: Emanuel Derman
I 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…
Comments closedThe key result of options pricing is that if you hedge at implied volatility, then over the next instant dt a long options position produces…
Comments closedA few months ago I wrote the following about how to justify working in finance: “Some people have jobs that very clearly benefit humanity: doctors,…
Comments closedSomewhere I seem to think I once read the line “Karma is the mechanical expiation of sin.” I mentioned it in my book and seemed…
Comments closedThere was an article by Richard Dawkins in last Friday’s WSJ , which was itself a condensed version of an L.A. Times article of Jan…
Comments closedI got a fair number of answers to the question of what single sentence would best pass on the essence of quantitative finance to the…
Comments closedMany years ago I saw Louis Malle’s movie ‘My Dinner with Andre.’ The whole movie does indeed take place over dinner, more or less in…
Comments closedThere’s an interesting review of Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the latest NY Review of Books, by H. Allen Orr, a professor of biology at…
Comments closedA couple of posts ago I was pondering what single sentence about quantitative finance would best tell people in the future how to think about…
Comments closedI was having a conversation about model risk the other day, and I think it’s a misnomer. Risk to me means the possibility that something…
Comments closedI was in Geneva at a Risk Conference earlier this week, and one of the talks I heard about behavioral finance posited that the most…
Comments closedSome time in the early 1970s Nature magazine had an article about people whose names matched their occupations. There was a famous neurology textbook “Diseases…
Comments closedI was idly watching bits of ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ on TV the other night. There was one scene where Tom Hanks flies to NYC to…
Comments closedCarolyn Porco, the Boulder scientist I mentioned two blogs ago who sees science as everyone’s solace for the universe’s apparently dispassionate behavior towards humans and…
Comments closed(After Goethe) The fluorescent tubes Are dim. In all the cubes You cannot glimpse One screen aglow. Even the Spanish cleaning lady’s dined. One last…
Comments closedAlong with Fischer Black, Emanuel Derman is one of the people responsible for molding Goldman Sachs? reputation of the late eighties and early nineties. Derman…
Comments closedIn his review of the recent books by Smolin and Woit on the status of string theory, David Lindley writes: (see www.wilsoncenter.org……): “The problem with…
Comments closedThere is this sudden rash of books by famous scientists suggesting we extirpate religion from society, starting with Daniel Dennett ‘s “Breaking the Spell: Religion…
Comments closedLanding at San Francisco Airport recently I saw an Air New Zealand plane. What immediately struck me was the tail logo: so serious, so proud,…
Comments closedPeople seem to believe that the ability to talk developed in order to improve communication beyond mere gestures and grunts. But perhaps the ability to…
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