Telescopes and Mathematical Finance

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) operates several astronomical telescopes. e.g, in the Atacama desert, Chile. One of the driest places on earth (picture).
Austria joined ESO in 2008. The Austrian Adaptive Optics Team (Indmath, RICAM and MathConsult, makers of UnRisk) is developing correction software to be used in the 40m extremely large telescope (E-ELT) that will be the largest ground-based telescope in 2020. It will have the size of a football stadium.

Finance Is Not Medicine.

I frequently read Mark Buchanan's Blog The Physics of Finance and I enjoy reading it and being interested in complex systems (complex economy) I get new insight when reading it. And I agree that positive feed backs often drive markets away from equilibriums and that this can have big consequences ...
I referred to The Physics of Finance here, here, here, here, ...

Another 11 ...

This morning I read 11 things organizations can learn from airports - Seth Godin's Blog.

Anybody as Smart as Everybody?

You know Andreas, Michael A, Michael S, Sascha and me (authors). You know our distinguished partners and featured customers Grant, Guillermo, Michael S, Rolf, Stefan, Wolfgang and their innovations, summarized here.
Andrea, Andreas, Anita, .. and all the other UnRiskers, as well as dozens of partners and featured customers were not introduced explicitly....

Fitch Acquires 7 City Learning

A few minutes after I have published "Kill Your Idols" I received the info that Fitch Group acquired 7 City Learning, an innovator in promoting understanding of financial concepts.

Kill Your Idols?

Kill Yr Idols is a little album of the alternative rock band from NY City: Sonic Youth. 
I like music from John Adams to John Zorn across many genres. Especially when it has experimental cores. My little iPod stores now about 20.000 single titles and I play them on my Geneva Sound System XL (If UnRisk was a Sound System ....).

Create More Value Than You Can Capture

suggests Tim O'Reilly the media CEO and web visionary who has often spotted the future coming before the rest of us.
We are a comparatively small outfit and we build our principles from experience and original thinking - but we also listen to the great minds. We do not always agree, but in this case we really do.

Is Cognitive Financial Computing Coming Soon?

Simplified, cognitive computing aims to emulate the way human brains compute.
Systems learn instead of relying on programming only.
To do this they need to enhance and augment our senses with techniques like artificial intelligence, machine learning, advances feature recognition, natural language programming ....

The Cloud and the Grass

You know that I think virtualization and cloud computing is one of the things risk managers should be thankful for in 2013.

What Is UnRisk For?

It is for derivative and risk analytics.

Sure the purpose of UnRisk is to make money - we are business people. But to make money we need to offer better derivative and risk analytics.  Not the other way around.

Smarter Information - Smarter Users

We are providers of technologies that enable users to do things that cannot be done without, but also automate tasks - in the complex environment of quantitative risk management.

They Are Tired - But The Book Is Now At Wiley

Today Michael Aichinger and Andreas Binder submitted the final version of their manuscript: A Workout in Computational Finance, to Wiley.

The book covers many topics relevant in quantitative finance from a practitioner's point of view, backed with the mathematical knowledge the authors collected when solving complex technical and financial problems with their advanced cross-sectoral mathematical schemes - for blast furnaces, telescopes, combustion engines ... and quantitative finance, implemented in UnRisk for bank proof derivative and risk analytics. 

Sorry Mouse - Leap Motion Is Coming

I found this in "Wired Insider".  A Leap Motion device that translates gestures from hands and fingers into fine controls in a computer.

One Day Technology Will Know What We Want.

This is what experts think what technology will do for or us ... one day, in the near future. One day everything will be custom ...

Model Testosterone Skews?

The article in the UK issue of Wired, Jan-13 titled "Why Men Risk It All" refers to John Coates' research on psychology and risk taking. John Coates was a trader at Wall Street and is now a Senior Research Fellow in Neuroscience and Finance (Cambridge University).

The core of his hypothesis and challenging idea: testosterone the molecule of irrational exuberance and cortisol the molecule of irrational pessimism do control and manipulate our decisions significantly (but we thinks they are conscious processes).
That a lot of decisions are manipulated by signals of our body has been explored by sport physiologists who study the influence of hormones on athletic performance ...

The waves of irrational exuberance and pessimism that destabilise the financial markets may be driven by physiological changes taking place within traders as they make or lose money and as market volatility rises and falls, says John Coates.

And I ask myself, if we in the future will need to model (calibrate models to) Testosterone Skews or should financial risk decisions be left more to women?

11 Years of UnRisk Event - an Inside Summary

In Do I Remember? I summarized remarkable experiences of 2012 of which our event celebrating 11years of UnRisk were one of the most insightful.

Do I Remember?

Today a year ago, where stood I, what do I know now that  I didn't …?

A Promise for 2013 - Quant Sourcing for the Small

Predictably, strict new rules by regulatory bodies will force small market participants to apply big changes in valuation and risk management. Sometimes I even have the feeling regulators focus on the small, because they are easier to control than the big names.

Do UnRiskers unrisk?

Programmers program, teachers teach, swimmers swim, ...  (but not only ...)

Do UnRiskers (UnRisk users) unrisk?