Tantalus On The Way to The Horizon? No Thanks!

The posts in our Mathematics topic grew fast in the recent weeks. This is part of our brand promise: we deliver not only software and use training, but know-how packages, including views behind the curtain. The Academy, the book, papers, posts, individual mentoring, ....


It is a lot of extra work and it needs the integration of problem-solving competence, a sound theoretical background and didactic skills. Does this pay back?

Should we care?

In do we work to get picked I have outlined that we rather like to choose ourselves. Independence is one of the reasons. Success shall be about our own capabilities to control the financial and professional outcome of our work.

In search of perfection?

I am probably doing everything wrong when it comes to my posts. Not short, too general, typos, bumpy language, ... Sorry for that. I have to confess that I spend only little time to edit or polish them. But it's my views and it shall push what we, at UnRisk, think and how we work.

It's about more than independence - avoid the Tantalus torment

We are passionate about quant finance and future technologies. We work hard to innovate. But as mentioned in other post innovation is not without risk. We want to reach "Asymptopia" where we have enough informative data, perfectly accurate and robust models and the behavior of financial markets is completely revealed.

But remember, when we strive toward the horizon it often escapes. Knowing more, we might find more unknowns. Applying a more complicated model might close the gap between real and fair market behavior, but calibration errors, results of the additional complexity make it worse in a non-determinstic manner.

Tantalus torment. In Greek mythology Tantalus was (to good reasons) punished by the gods to stand in water - when he tried to drink the water drained away and when he stretched to grasp the fruit above his head the wind blew it out of his reach.

We, at UnRisk, recognize that perfect knowledge will be forever out of reach. And we are happy with the many smaller insights - we share them, listen to the feed back and try to combine them for the better ...

No, we will not run after all quick ideas quickly ... We rather take time to perform deeper analysis, like extreme-bounds analysis .. example in Extreme Vasicek is nor extreme enough .. before we adopt it.

This is a kind of higher freedom that let us sleep better. Avoiding the Tantalus torment.

The Tantalus analogy from E. E. Leamer's article