black sholes, efficient markets, Long Term Capital Management, modern finance, roger lowenstein
In BOOK Review on February 16, 2010 at 12:08 PM

RECOMMENDED.
If ever you were thinking of investing in accordance with popular academic wisdom, you’d better read this first.
Lowenstein dramatically illustrates what happens when you take high brow academics out of the ivory tower, complete with Nobel Prizes of Economics in tow, and turn them loose on a billion-dollar hedge fund. Read the rest of this entry »
cdo, credit default swaps, Financial Crisis, Hedge Fund, Long Term Capital Management, Risk, Robert Merton
In Investment GIANTS on August 1, 2009 at 10:04 PM
There’s much to learn from Nobel Laureate Robert Merton, both what to do and what not to do.
Hailed as the Newton of Modern Finance, in academic circles he’s perhaps most famous for the Black-Scholes-Merton options pricing formula, for which he shared the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics.
In 1998 Merton was partly to blame for the collapse of Long Term Capital Management–a hedge fund which failed spectacularly by losing $4.6 billion in less than four months. In January 2009, his financial advisory firm Trinsum Group, filed for bankruptcy.