Paul's Blog

Science in Finance II “…ists”

A century or two ago, finance was the career for the less talented members of the family. Sons of the aristocracy would eventually go to sit in the House of Lords, while overseeing their property. […]

Paul's Blog

Science in Finance I: Supply and demand

That’s it in a nutshell, supply and demand. Everything is driven by supply and demand. And if you want any financial principle as the foundation for a (scientific) theory then this is it, just like […]

Paul's Blog

Science in Finance: Introduction

Having for most of my quant career attacked the majority of mathematical modelling in finance for being ‘unscientific’ (in the sense that the theories are rarely tested before being used, and when tested usually fail […]

Paul's Blog

It is and it isn’t

I couldn’t resist this rather trivial blog, just a comment really on happenings at a recent quantie dinner. In attendance, going clockwise around the table at Union Square Cafe, PW, Bruno Dupire, Salih Neftci, Peter […]

Paul's Blog

Priests and Applied Mathematicians

Nassim Taleb and I were lecturing in Mexico City at the weekend (thanks, RiskMathics!). In our free time we visited Teotichucan with its two impressive pyramids. The larger (Pyramide del Sol) is the third largest […]

Paul's Blog

Labour Gets A Head

Watching Gordon Brown speaking at the Labour Party conference I was reminded of that quotation by the insightful Georges Clemenceau, “Not to be a socialist at 20 is proof of want of heart, to be […]

Paul's Blog

Mexican Wave

Entirely unoriginal, but I couldn’t resist taking this photo from the dais before my recent lecture at the HSBC Global Markets Conference, Latin America, held at Los Cabos, Mexico. (One of the audience members suggested […]

Paul's Blog

Swedish Message

And so my travels take me to the OMX in Stockholm where I had been invited to give a few lectures (fear and greed, blackjack and vol arb). The other two speakers were Joe Corona […]

Paul's Blog

Cannes Film Festival

The Cannes Film Festival, of sorts, began in 1939 as a palatable alternative to the Venice Film Festival which had by then developed a nasty habit of giving all its awards to chums of Hitler […]