Not in the Toothbrush Business

Traveling back from Zurich, Andreas read about the trends in the financial markets, see FT and Convertibles, while I tried to get insight from other businesses. In the English issue of Wired the cover story was on "Inside Google". 



Top management coming to word: "It's to work on problems on a scale that no one else can do. Call this the toothbrush problem. There's not many things you use as much ...".

For us, in quantitative finance, it would be something like providing an option calculator for everybody. Based on the Black-Scholes formula, .... But again it is not that simple. It is not the formula, it is the concept and methodology which makes the Black-Scholes-Merton approach so exciting.

And we will emphasize on questions like what if the BS model is extended to, say, stochastic volatility, jumps, .. and one does not solve the equations with real care, apply naive calibration approaches, .... We strive to offer the most accurate and robust schemes for those complex models in UnRisk.

And yes, market participants who can take advantage from such extra information are not that many.

So, we are not in the toothbrush business.

(but on the technology layer, we are ready to exploit ubiquitous computing developments from Microsoft, Google, .. )