Thursday, December 8, 2011

Tailors

by Rick Nason, PhD, CFA

Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.

www.RSDsolutions.com

info@RSDsolutions.com

 

I was conducting a class last week when we starting discussing a quote attributed to Einstein that “Elegance is for tailors”.  The meaning that I take from this is that as scientists (and as risk managers I consider us to be scientists – although what science(s) we should be is a great topic for a future blog) should be most concerned with the functional and what works, rather than what is mathematically elegant.

 

There is a lot of finance and risk management that is elegant.  The problem is that a lot of it is wrong.  It assumes conditions that are only approximately correct (I blogged before on quasi-arbitrage), and thus when scaled up to industrial size the mistakes become huge, rendering the original elegant result not only wrong but misleadingly wrong.

 

An old saying that I first saw attributed to Riskmetrics rephrases Einstein’s saying as; “It is better to be approximately right, than precisely wrong”.  Let’s leave the tailoring to the tailors.  (Unfortunately great tailors are a dying breed.)

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