You can't generate positive alpha without a PhD.

the butterfly effect , BINGO ! :D



Modern orthodoxy of finance (Capital Asset Pricing Model or CAPM) is based on the shaky assumption that financial phenomena can be described according to a Gaussian normal distribution, that is they claim to be able to eliminate the possibility of extreme un-forecasted events with a 99 percent probability and to indicate for each level of risk an efficient portfolio maximizing return.
Mandelbrot demonstrates rather conclusively that Gaussian normal distribution of financial prices has been subject to oversimplification to make the data fit in the model, because of "fat tails", concentration and extreme events.
This means that CAPM is useful only when there is less need of it - that is when markets are calm, while is of no utility with extreme events.
Exposing weaknesses in the orthodoxy is not an intellectual pastime, since everyone can still remember the crash of 1987, the many financial crises from 1992 (the disruption of the European exchange rate mechanism, the crises of Mexico, South East Asia, Russia, Argentina,...), the disaster of LTCM in 1998 (it employed 25 PhD and 2 Nobel medalist in economics for their works in finance) and lastly the financial crises after the buoyant markets and high tech bubbles of 2000.



Whitster,

Let's write together a best-seller :cool:
 
greed is built up , step by step over a long time frame ; months, years..tech bubble,tulip mania, etc...

panic and fear reach their maximum in seconds,minutes


that's why you see the biggest spikes to the downside and not upside



HUMAN behavior dictates markets, indeed
 
This seems to be a troll.

What I find amusing is that the fellow says that he wants to be a professor of
finance, claims expertise sufficient to have made it into some PhD program,
and is completely undisturbed by all of the by now well-analysed data that
tends to contradict his assertions: empirical probability distributions of
price returns are skewed and leptokurtotic, and also show
heteroskedasticity. This much is evident in the distributions of daily and
weekly returns on, say, the S&P 500.

More importantly, tick by tick price time series clearly exhibit non-trivial
autocorrelation. The null hypothesis that drift corrected price time series
are diffusive on all time scales is thus ruled out, and such a conclusion is
robust statistically. All of this should be well known to any well-trained
undergraduate in the area of quantitative finance at the present time.

Analysis of actual data suggests to any objective observer, even one who has
never traded, that the possibility of obtaining an edge in trading may be real
enough, although the simple facts above about the time series certainly don't
translate easily into a tradeable edge or suggest that it is easy to find one.

In any case my guess is that becoming a well-payed tenured professor of
finance is not an easy or automatic consequence of obtaining a PhD in finance,
at least not if the field is anywhere near as competitive as academic physics.

In physics very, very few with freshly minted PhDs are offered assistant
professorships. Starting salaries for physics post-docs are not high,
certainly nowhere near 140K. Post-docs at national labs are getting about
45-50K these days, and the numbers are lower at many universities. Most people
who go into physics, and try for an academic career, can expect to have to
follow a long and hard road after the PhD, before they have anything like a
secure position. Of those who obtain tenured professorships most don't end up
at top-tier institutions, where the rate of obtaining tenure after getting a
tenure track assistant professorship can be as low as 1 in 20. Of course,
with a position like that on your resume, you can probably count on getting a
position at a second or third tier institution, but pay is much lower at
second and third tier universities and colleges.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if the overall washout rate is as high in theoretical physics as it is in trading.
 
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