In the world of personal finance, people debate about everything. Among these arguments is the question of how to measure risk. In general, partisans on this topic fall into one of two camps. In the first group are those who believe risk can be quantified and distilled down to a single number. [...]
The HMS Dreadnought
On February 7, 1910, an odd event occurred in the British town of Weymouth. A group of five arrived for a tour of the HMS Dreadnought, a battleship that was the pride of Britain’s navy. The five were welcomed with fanfare, their staff having communicated in advance that they were members of the [...]
The legacy of Harry Markowitz
Those who live very long lives sometimes face an unfair irony: The accomplishments of even towering figures can lose their luster over time—not because they’re proven wrong but because the ideas they developed become so widely accepted that we forget they were once new. The investment world lost one [...]
Submergence—what it is, and how to avoid it
Where does the stock market stand? After last year’s decline, is it now fairly valued, or still overvalued? When I think about questions like this, I’m reminded of an opinion piece by Robert Shiller written a few years back. By way of background, Shiller is a professor at Yale and a Nobel Prize [...]
Risky business
Open a finance textbook, and you’ll find discussions of volatility and beta, value-at-risk, the Sharpe ratio, the Sortino ratio, the Treynor ratio and many others. All of these are quantitative tools for measuring risk. But what should you make of these metrics—are they an effective way to control [...]
