Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory

An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory This is a terse account of group creation of modern finance theory; and a sampling of my prosaic autobiographical investing and consulting for nonprofit academies. Eschewing 1900 Bachelier and 1905 Einstein white noise randomness, my martingale version of market micro efficiency invoked no violation of economic law. My attempts to establish pricing theory for options fell a bit short of the Black-Scholes-Merton Holy Grail. For life cycle investing, mathematicians’ maximum growth Kelly criterion was debunked, as were vulgar notions that necessarily riskiness is averaged downward for long-term investors. Popular Markowitz-Tobin quadratic programming was shown to hold generically only for smallest price variations or for unrealistic risk-aversion functions. Because economic history at best obeys only quasi-stationary probabilities, no sure-thing formulas will ever be definable. Excess returns—excess “alphas”—can result only from early new “insider” knowledge, however acquired—legally or illegally. Boo hoo. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Annual Review of Financial Economics Annual Reviews

An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory

Loading next page...
 
/lp/annual-reviews/an-enjoyable-life-puzzling-over-modern-finance-theory-w0Srtgsb6O

References (14)

Publisher
Annual Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
ISSN
1941-1367
eISSN
1941-1375
DOI
10.1146/annurev.financial.050808.114446
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This is a terse account of group creation of modern finance theory; and a sampling of my prosaic autobiographical investing and consulting for nonprofit academies. Eschewing 1900 Bachelier and 1905 Einstein white noise randomness, my martingale version of market micro efficiency invoked no violation of economic law. My attempts to establish pricing theory for options fell a bit short of the Black-Scholes-Merton Holy Grail. For life cycle investing, mathematicians’ maximum growth Kelly criterion was debunked, as were vulgar notions that necessarily riskiness is averaged downward for long-term investors. Popular Markowitz-Tobin quadratic programming was shown to hold generically only for smallest price variations or for unrealistic risk-aversion functions. Because economic history at best obeys only quasi-stationary probabilities, no sure-thing formulas will ever be definable. Excess returns—excess “alphas”—can result only from early new “insider” knowledge, however acquired—legally or illegally. Boo hoo.

Journal

Annual Review of Financial EconomicsAnnual Reviews

Published: Jan 1, 2009

There are no references for this article.