Conflict is a recurring problem for financial risk management. At your own firm, are risk managers dismissed as “risk police”? Are risk committee meetings contentious? Do traders hoard information? If you answered “yes” to some of these, you may have a serious problem. I just returned from London where I conducted a two-day strategic planning [...]
Imagine you are stranded on a desert island. For fresh water there are three natural springs, but it is possible one or more have been poisoned. To minimize your risk, what is your optimal strategy for drinking from the springs? You might: select one of the three springs at random and drink exclusively from it, [...]
Benford’s Law is a fascinating theorem from statistics that states, for most forms of data, the leading digits of numbers are not uniformly distributed among 1 through 9. Instead, any given data point has a 30.1% probability of having a 1 as its leading digit. There is a 17.6% probability of the leading digit being [...]
A free nation, not to mention free markets, depend on a free, independent press. How can voters make wise decisions—or investors allocate assets prudently—if the news they rely on is manipulated? Reporters struggle to inform their audiences, depending on sources for information while trying to avoid being played by those same sources. Day after day, [...]
Long before Mark Twain stood on Wall Street and saw it was a “street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other,” there has been financial manipulation and scams. During the Punic Wars against Carthage, businessmen offered to ship supplies to Rome’s army on condition the state insured their ships and [...]