HIQLEQ
In 1983 Howard Gardner proposed a theory of 'multiple intelligences,' and to date has listed eight different types: Spatial; Linguistic; Logical-mathematical; Bodily-kinesthetic; Musical;...
View ArticleQuant Lessons From The Royal Wedding
I like to teach certain quant finance ideas by reference to real life, often involving supermarkets and tins of baked beans (see for example The Role of Mathematics in Finance: Relevance, Reliance,...
View ArticleThe "Inbox Test for Stability of the Global Financial Market"
Another day, another email in my inbox announcing another High Frequency Trading conference. I have nothing against the emails (we send quite a few of them ourselves) and I have nothing against HFT per...
View ArticleRewarding Mathematics
We hear a lot about how talent will leave the major financial centres if taxes or regulations become unacceptable. That people move to more favourable locations is more or less plausible. But what...
View ArticleCyberterrorism
Cyberterrorism is in the news so I thought I'd share this little story with you. A year or two ago I was at a dinner of the Great and the Good. I sat next to an Ambassador. We chatted broadly about the...
View ArticleHigh-frequency Trading: Where are we and how did we get here?
"The truth is the high-frequency traders create volatility and create liquidity," said John Damgard, president of the Futures Industry Association. What he apparently meant to say was that they reduce...
View ArticleOccupy Wall Street? I Never Heard Such A Thing!
I've been popping downtown to Zucotti Park, near Wall Sreet, over the last few days. Did you know there's a protest going on, against bankers, corporate greed, corrupt politicians? You'd never guess if...
View ArticleBankers Can?t Avoid Risk by Hiding It
(A version of this was first published on Bloomberg.com on May 24, 2011.) One of the supposed silver linings of our recent economic disaster was the idea that we finally understood how hazardous our...
View ArticleTaxation To Slow Down High-Frequency Speculation While Not Affecting Hedging...
The Tobin (or Robin Hood) Tax was proposed decades ago by the eponymous Nobel Laureate (that?s James Tobin, not Robin Hood) as a means of stabilizing currencies via a small tax on all transactions....
View ArticleEurope ? What?s the point?
I have always believed that the EU and the Euro are simply ego trips for a few Northern European politicians, their desire for a legacy. For Southern and Eastern Europeans the EU and Euro are a quick...
View ArticleNew Flag For Old
Replace the Scottish Blue with the Welsh Green? It has a certain 'freshness' about it. I don't think it works as well on a tie, but the new flag is actually much better than the old on a waistcoat, for...
View ArticleMy Experience Of The OCC And Their Understanding Of Risk
I can now reveal that is was the OCC... The nameless regulator I criticized in my blog on calibration, "Bankers Can't Avoid Risk by Hiding It," was the Office of the Comptroller of Currency in...
View ArticleHigh Frequency Trading and the UK Government?s Whitewash
The UK Government?s Foresight Project has just announced the results of its two-year investigation into electronic trading and markets. And the good news for hedgies is that they?ve decided that...
View ArticleHave You Had An Illness That Wasn't Your Fault?
Scientific advance that is certainly to be exploited by ambulance-chasing lawyers: DNA sequencing of MRSA used to stop outbreak. This is the beginning of the story that I've been predicting for years....
View ArticleFitch Acquires 7city - great news for the CQF!
Fitch and 7city are forming "Fitch 7city Learning," press release below. This is fantastic news for the CQF as it means an already brilliant course is now unstoppable in its goal to improve quant...
View ArticleTrolls, Troll Hunters and Troll Groupies - the wilmott.com experience
Trolls are in the news with a vengeance. We are hearing about anonymous tweet threats of rape, threats of bombing, and imagined details of a certain academic's lady garden. Many of the commentators are...
View ArticleYou Naughty Spies
I'd like to share statistics that I recently discovered after installing the Ghostery privacy tool, used for finding and blocking trackers on websites. There's been a lot in the news about Edward...
View ArticleNow is the Perfect Time to Raise Interest Rates
UK inflation is at a 15-year low, 0.5% in December. This has been caused in part by the sudden plummet in oil prices, lower food prices, and also the high gas and electricity prices from last year...
View ArticleHow I Successfully Forecast The Results Of The UK General Election 2015
Here's the start of the paper I've just written on forecasting the UK General Election (rather easy for a quant, much easier than valuing a CDO!), and lectured on for the CQF yesterday. The lecture...
View ArticleThe EU Debate and Averages
Don?t you hate it when you hear that the EU costs/benefits each UK citizen £x per annum? They make it sound like everyone pays/gets exactly the same every year, like either a personal membership fee...
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