Almost four years ago I had a competition in which I asked people to enter one sentence that would pass on the essence quantitative finance to our descendants, assuming all knowledge had been destroyed.

One of the entries that summed it up was:

Time and the right to choose have value.

by Marcos Carreira.

I want to modify it with an asterisk:

Time and the right to choose have value*.

* And when you’re dealing with an uncertain future**, the average value across possible futures is a better estimate than the value at the average future.

** And aren’t they all?