Skip to main content

Econophysics

As everyone ponders why could we not have seen the financial crisis one line of thought is can physics help us and so the rise of the new field called econophysics - the use of tools of physics in economics. However Rick Bookstaber thinks no . Nice post around this newest avataar. Excerpts


"during an earthquake things shake around and fall, and during a market crisis things shake around and fall. Seismology predicts the former, so why not the latter? "

"...fledgling discipline of econophysics. The reason it persists is first of all, there are not many jobs for physicist in physics, and most of finance is child’s play once you have gone through the rigors of a physics degree, so a lot of physicists end up in finance." :-)

"while physics can generate useful models if there is well-parameterized uncertainty, where we know the distribution of the randomness, it becomes less useful if the uncertainty is fuzzy and ill-defined, what is called Knightian uncertainty."

"In the Bruce Lee movie, Enter the Dragon, Lee faces his arch enemy in a fight. To intimidate Lee, his opponent holds up a board, and splits it in two with his fist. Lee watches passively and says, “Boards don’t hit back”. That gets to the reason physics does not work in finance: markets do hit back."

" You can’t build in a feedback or reactive model, because you don’t know what to model. And if you do know – by the time you know – the odds are the market has changed. That is the whole point of what makes a trader successful – he can see things in ways most others do not, anticipate in ways others cannot, and then change his behavior when he starts to see others catching on."


http://rick.bookstaber.com/2010/08/physics-envy-in-finance.html
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Steve Blank

Some good advice from Steve Blank.... So, my first lesson is – You don’t need to be the smartest person in the room to be the most effective. Being effective means not just mastering the facts but – figuring out how to move your agenda forward. misdirection is designed to distract you from the truth . Obscuring a fact-based argument with a faith-based one is what demagogues do – in policy and politics .  See through it. Help others to see how this kind of misdirection distorts their perspectives. when you hear or see something that is too good to be true – follow the money . It’s usually a long and winding road – but eventually you’ll find it. Change happens when you can educate and inspire others – when you can use facts to create faith in what’s possible . Graduates, as you set out on your own extraordinary adventures, remember the measure of a life is not time or money. It’s the impact you make serving God, your family, community, and country. Your report card i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Success

Lovely Post as we start 2016 "The most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. So choose your struggles wisely, my friend" .. and the full post Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when you walk into the room. Everyone would like that—it’s easy to like that. If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to  be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything. A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out....
3 comments
Read more

Advice

" Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket guidance software at JPL, mistakes are rarely fatal in our industry, so we can, and should, learn, laugh, and move on." " No matter how much "karate" you know, someone else will always know more. Such an individual can teach you some new moves if you ask. Seek and accept input from others, especially when you think it's not needed." "Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience. Nontechnical people who deal with developers on a regular basis almost universally hold the opinion that we are prima donnas at best and crybabies at worst. Don't reinforce this stereotype with anger and impatience." " The only true authority stems from knowledge, not from position. Knowledge engenders authority, and authority engenders respect -- so...
Post a Comment
Read more