The online Up-Goer Five text editor only allows you to use the 1000 most common English words and their derivatives (that is, it will underline and reject the others).Can you use it to write what quantitative finance is? And will it give us some new insight into it?

Haha -- good puzzle! After a few try's, I came up with:The stuff we care about goes all over the place like a walk by a drunk. We try to explain it with numbers and thinking and crazy ideas

If two deals pay the same money in the end, you should pay the same for each today. There is no free lunch.

Clearly I got carried away:I work with a group of people in an office. Other people give us money to buy shares. A person I work with buys shares if she thinks she can get shot of the shares later for more money. She adds them to the group of shares we already have. But the shares might go down, not up. My job is to work out how much money we could lose if the shares go down. I use a computer to look at how much money the group of shares would have been on each day in the past. The computer then guesses how much money we could lose tomorrow, by looking at how quickly the group of shares went up and down in the past. Sometimes we don't actually buy the shares, but instead do a 'forward' deal with someone. It's a bit like they buy the shares for you, then you pay money to or from each other if the shares go down or up. This way we make the same money as if we bought the shares and closed out later. But this way, we don't need to pay all the money up front. We also do other deals, where instead of someone buying a share, they buy the right to deal a share later. It's hard to work out how much money the right should be. Mr Black & Mr Scholes had a way to work it out though. We can use a computer to work it out the same way. We need to know what day the right to deal finishes on. We need to know how much money the share deal would be for. We also need to know how much the share jumps up and down. Usually, the more the share jumps, and the longer time until the deal finishes, the more money paid for the deal. This is because of the higher chance of making a lot of money on the final share deal. As well as doing deals on shares, we do deals on the interest that gets paid on money. We give a group of people some money, and they pay us interest on the money, before paying us all the money back later. We agree up front that they pay either fixed interest or changing interest. We find out what the changing interest should be from ICE. If we think there is a chance that the people won't pay the money back, we ask for more interest. If the chance is low, then we only ask for a little bit more. If the chance is high, we ask for a lot more. Sometimes we do a deal where we pay either fixed or changing interest, and get back the other type in return. With these deals, we work out at the beginning what the fixed interest should be so that it matches the money that we think the changing interest will be. We also do deals on the right to enter one of those deals later... Sometimes we'll buy a building, like an office or a shop. People pay us money to use the building.

I love this! I want to spend time better explaining bonds, adding in a bit about CDS etc, but I need to get on with the day job.The fact that words like 'sell', 'price', 'amount', 'value' and 'bank' are excluded make it very tricky.I like that the site gives you a list of the 1,000 words. It would be very useful if they were also categorised, or if there was a synonym tool.I was very happy that I could cheat with my use of ICE! Loved the STAR WARS plot!