<t>So, I'm wondering where I can place a bet on its outcome, and find some suckers to take the other side! >>Would you be willing to define a binary bet for which you think the short position is equal in value to the long, and let me pay you a 5% premium for getting to choose whether to take the sho...

I believe there is a prohibition in the US against patenting anything that is "common knowledge," whatever that is. Specifically, I had heard that a patent on the water bed was denied because it had been described years earlier in a Robert Heinlein novel.

<r>From your experience, what actuarial course exam is suitable for a beginner to write ? EA-1 or course 1 ? What is the difference between them ? >>Course 1 is a better start. EA-1 is a governmental exam that is worth something only to pension actuaries. Course 1 is an exam of calculus and linear a...

If I recall correctly, a "Brady Bond" is a government debt issuance from a developing country that has some sort of backup from the US Government. They are named for the US Secretary of the Treasury, James Brady, at the time that the program was begun.

<t>Inevitably, businesses will manage to whatever is measured, so if there is any risk that is not measured by a standardized control system, that risk will inevitably become the most significant risk there is just because no one will be working very hard at avoiding it.However, even in the absence ...

<t>Yes, I would say that in a certain sense, EMH is vacuous. However, I don't think it really is vacuous in the most important sense. EMH is vacuous in a logical positivist sense: we can't really know anything, so everything from the theory of gravity to the latest line on the NCAA Tournament is vac...

<t>Well, maybe the paragraph is vacuous, then. I don't think there's anything too deep about it, other than perhaps my convoluted linguistic stylings.Maybe I can clarify a bit. By a market "model," as opposed to a "meta-model," I mean a belief that market prices will behave in a particular way. When...

<t>The thing about EMH is that it isn't really a model at all -- it's really a meta-model. If anyone can present a model that really works, EMH says that unless prices are thus and so arbitrageurs will be able to make unusual profits, which they can be expected to do until the prices become thus and...

<t>Do you mean a person without passig some of SOA exams still can work in an insurance company ? >>No, that's not what I meant. Exams are the coin of the realm for beggining to mid-level actuaries. You might be able to get an actuarial position in an insurance company without any exams, but you gen...

<t>Very few actuaries studied actuarial science as such in college, so that is a non-issue.<br/> <br/> I worked as a pension actuary in the US, so my experience is not necessarily representative of what most actuaries do, most actuaries working at insurance companies.<br/> <br/> Most of the intellec...

What do you want to know?

<t>An actuary is a highly trained professional who will assure you that a tossed coin will come to rest on its edge.<br/> <br/> Actuaries are overly fixated on future value probability distributions, but (as someone trained as an actuary, bear in mind) I also think that quants are overly fixated on ...

Okay; I seem to have lost a fractional exponent in my doodling: v^2 in the Heston model does not explode.

??

If we look at v^2 in the Heston model, doesn't it potentially blow up in finite time? But if v^2 has become infinite, doesn't that necessarily mean that v has become infinite as well?

Reza:

Doesn't the Heston model blow up as well, albeit more slowly (gunpowder rather than dynamite)? I think a very desirable quality for a volatility model is stability, which neither model possesses.