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It is not all the quants’ fault.

There is plenty of blame to go around from the current global financial crisis. But, I would like to point out that it is not “all the quants’ fault.” We are all now, unfortunately, sitting in the middle of a high quality (and extremely expensive) lesson in financial mathematics. I […]

Map Reduce: A Good Idea

Some time ago I subscribed to The Database Column because it would be fun to see what these incredible people wanted to discuss. We owe much of our current database technology to Professor Stonebraker and Vertica sounds like an incredible product. And I definitely want to continue to subscribe. However, […]

The Purpose of this Blog

The purpose of this blog (which is not quite “blog like” in its promise of a once a month longish technical article) is to educate, share the Win-Vector principles and learn more about writing (through practice). I am a big fan of “understanding through writing” (you learn through trying to […]

A Quick Appreciation of the Sharpe Ratio

The current state of the global financial markets has gotten more people than usual worrying about the technical aspects of finance. One method for reasoning about investment returns and risk is a tool called the Sharpe Ratio. It is well worth reviewing this measure and seeing how, if used properly, […]