News

Regulatory Camouflage

My faith in government institutions and the people working for them has been restored by Martin Wolf of the FT when he pointed out an excellent paper “Why Banks Failed the Stress Test” by Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England.…

A lottery of bonuses

Another application in an FT article of the long-dated option strategy (see earlier post) this time to discredit the UK Government’s attempts to limit the risk of the short-term bonus culture in financial markets. The article is funny and makes a lot of sense, but the need to “do something” for the outraged public will unfortunately mean that not many politicians will take any note of it.…

Data management, derivative analytics and the spreadsheet

Interesting article out doing the rounds on the newswires announcing a forthcoming report called “The Enterprise Spreadsheet: Pushing towards Transparency” by the analyst firm the Tabb Group. It is great to see an analyst firm acknowledging the importance of spreadsheets within the markets, particularly in the area of combining data and analytics together in OTC derivatives management (see earlier post).…

The Respect Scenario from the FSA?

The presentation by the FSA last night on their consultative paper called "Stress and Scenario Testing (CP 08/24)" was a real disappointment last night. The presentation was at best average, not adding any more value than what you could get from scanning their paper.…

What Investment Banking is all about?

I admire the boldness and openness of Richard Jory, Editor of Structured Products Magazine, for asking the serious and under-answered question whether it is a problem or not that the likes of the equity derivatives division of BNP Paribas lose 1.5 billion Euro in one quarter after making around 15 billion over the past five years?…

The “Bubble Index” Cometh…

Seems like my idea of detecting and hedging against future economic price bubbles via a “bubble index” (see last paragraph of earlier post) is maybe not so stupid as I might have thought judging by a letter in the FT today.…

Don’t just say the numbers, count!

Teachers at my son's school gave a presentation the other night, on the methods they use to teach maths to him and his classmates. Amongst a lot of interesting stuff, I thought one topic that was particularly profound was when a teacher explained that for a five year old, being able to count the numbers up to 20 was not the same as being able to count.…