Using Jeff Holman's comments in Quantitative Finance to illustrate 4 critical errors students should learn to avoid: 1) Mistaking tails (4th moment) for volatility (2nd moment), 2) Missing Jensen's Inequality, 3) Analyzing the hedging wihout the underlying, 4) The necessity of a numeraire in...

In the world of modern financial theory, portfolio construction has traditionally operated under at least one of two central assumptions: the constraints are derived from a utility function and/or the multivariate probability distribution of the underlying asset returns is fully known. In...

We present a non-naive version of the Precautionary (PP) that allows us to avoid paranoia and paralysis by confining precaution to specific domains and problems. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge...

The literature of heavy tails (typically) starts with a random walk and finds mechanisms that lead to fat tails under aggregation. We follow the inverse route and show how starting with fat tails we get to thin-tails when deriving the probability distribution of the response to a random...