June 23rd, 2005, 8:43 am
Yes, it is as you say...Relying on a model, means that you are assuming that the model captures the part of the market that you are interested in, and relatively to that, explains the price dynamics that you observe (and where it doesn't explain them, it's because the market is behaving in an anomalous way).So it is important to trust that the model is reasonably well behaved and explanatory of the part of the reality around which you are trading.Let's suppose that the model you are using is correct (ie. the data generating process of your real world is your model). From this lucky position, suppose you now observe that negligible changes in the market, produce vastly different set of values after recalibrating the model (or in other words the model is instable because too sensitive to the initial conditions).Because you know that the model is correct, the interpretation I'd have is to believe that the noise in the data can effect the model to a point that all the valid information it contains are obscured by little pertubation of your input parameters. Which makes the model useless, despite its correctness.In the real world, the model is never correct either, so as a trader you need the model to be relatively stable so that after enough time using it, you can start to trust it (and know when not to).Let now suppose that you use your model not for trading but for risk management. Common wisdom says that provide you price the instruments you buy, with the same model that you use to price the hedging instruments, you might still make the wrong deal, but at least the risk management is safe, and you are correctly controlling your risk.This is true, but if the model is unstable, it means that you need to adjust your hedges more often than you should, and re-hedging is expensive!gc