They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street - NYTimes.com

They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street - NYTimes.com
The newsy or useful point the article is trying to make kind of eludes me. From the front page snapshot, I thought there would be some statistic showing demand for quants has shot up with the crisis other than the discrete opinion of a quant professor who has a conflicted interest in selling his academic curriculum to prospective students. The reporter apparently just opened his quant rolodex and got a number of known quants say something that would make them look good and prop their books. Unlike what the title "They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street" would suggest, it does not try to hold any of those accountable.

How about BICs Sir, how about BICs, it actually would help...
I cry a river over this...

As I have described at length in other writings(See this or this ), and keep on saying, this crisis was a failure of the existing mathematical modeling framework at describing the real world dynamics of underlyings. Therefore the corresponding hedging and risk management strategies failed to represent reality and this fact becomes most obvious at times of crisis. One of the reasons for this development is the over-representation of former physicist at the highest levels of "quantdom" who have forced the adoption of a framework coming from another world. But "It ain't physics". It just ain't.
And I cry a river over this. I just cry a river over this....

Introduction to BICs Exchange Systems

In this post, I just added a presentation that hopefully more clearly stresses the relevance and applicability of BICs as a sorely needed risk management tool

Introduction to BICs

I am making my first post with an introduction to BICs that I have posted on my knol at:http://knol.google.com/k/phil-kongtcheu/introduction-to-basis-instruments/

This article provides a definition for the concept of Basis Instrument Contracts (BICs) and explains why such a concept is needed and useful in Finance, Economics and Mathematics. It explains how BICs are practical and represent both a prophylactic and a therapeutic structural tool for a crisis such as the 2008 crisis. BICs help mitigate market volatility and facilitate more robust risk management.

More about me also at: http://knol.google.com/k/phil-kongtcheu/-/24v2kgtuvzk2v/0#