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Author: Emanuel Derman
I’ve been catching up on the Nobel prizes. I was pleased to read about Nambu’s physics prize. He did profound and yet simple work on…
Comments closedThe truth is that computers are created by humans. They are not superintelligent. Even on Wall Street, they merely count very fast at the behest…
Comments closedThe last two years I spent at Goldman in risk management I was involved in developing methodologies to mark illiquid derivatives held by a variety…
Comments closedThis is still on my mind. There is a coupling between marking illiquid securities and rewarding people for trading them; in both cases, you need…
Comments closedFor a while yesterday I felt like the market was finally hitting the bottom, and so I wasn’t surprised to see the recovery late in…
Comments closedWhen I lived in South Africa in the ’60s, we used to buy Ayn Rand’s books when we traveled overseas, together with those of Henry…
Comments closedI spent most of my time in firmwide risk management at Goldman trying to get traders to mark their exotic products to market, or else…
Comments closedI saw this conclusion on a website about the sociology of finance: “Are the purveyors of models selling us lemons? At the core of the…
Comments closedJust some odd remarks. 1. Re Paul’s Name and Blame blog: I don’t think quants are the main mover behind the current crisis, which was…
Comments closedSleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and…
Comments closedWritten for the Encyclopedia of Quantitative Finance www.ederman.com……
Comments closedLast night after I got home a colleague called to suddenly offer me a last-minute ticket to see a preview of The Seagull directed by…
Comments closedThere are sad things in addition to the continuing collapse of the visible financial world and I ran into two of them in the past…
Comments closedToday’s News Of The Week in Review has an article about the precipitous temporary decline in UAL stock when an old news story about their…
Comments closedFor weeks the word ‘decimated’ has been appearing with increasing frequency in the financial press:’decimated banking industry’, ‘Lehman’s decimated mortgage portfolio’ etc. I remember hearing…
Comments closedStan Jonas once told me about aldaily.com…… and I made it my home page. Every day it has links to all sorts of new articles,…
Comments closedI like swimming and track and field, but why should only swimmers be allowed to traverse the same distance via four different methods, and to…
Comments closedMany years ago in the past, while running, I decided to try to shut my eyes and see how many steps I could take at…
Comments closedwhen I came here came from one source, a fictional one: the novel “Marjorie Morningstar” by Herman Wouk. It’s the story of a young Jewish…
Comments closedEver since I read Camille Paglia’s “Break Blow Burn” in which she comments on 43 famous poems, I’ve admired her writing. Her commentary is completely…
Comments closedI spent six days in Stockholm at the Nasdaq OMX Derivatives Week. It was a phenomenally well-organized conference, with only 4 or 5 speakers each…
Comments closed1. When did people first start to begin their emails with “Good morning” or “Good afternoon”? It suggests that you’re going to pay attention to…
Comments closedI am pleased to be joined today by Dr. Emanuel Derman. He is one of the first high-energy particle physicists to apply his knowledge to…
Comments closedThere are a slew of books on happiness lately: www.nybooks.com…… Many years ago a colleague of mine, dissatisfied about the mismatch between his potential and…
Comments closedUnexpected pleasures are always better than expected ones, and occasionally I’ve gone to see movies that I know almost nothing about except for the fact…
Comments closedWhy does using neuroscience to improve advertising bother me? I’m not sure, but here’s one argument I came up with. According to Corinthians (and many…
Comments closedWhile sleepless and low in Hong Kong at 4 a.m. I’ve seen several newspaper news reports that don’t seem either as dramatically good or bad…
Comments closedMy father knew a man called Mr Gilmour who was an engineer who finally retired somewhere in the late 1960s. In those days you used…
Comments closedWhy do they put ice cubes in urinals? The Indian restaurant I ate in last had about 20 or 30 in each vertical porcelain receptacle,…
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