Friday, September 03, 2004

Insanity by Numbers

Spent the last two days doing financial mathematics at the training centre. Now I must clarify one point - having an engineering degree does not mean financial math is easy. Sure, it's nothing but multiplying and dividing numbers, and simple statistics. (even if you look at a financial calculator, they often lack the scientific functions like sine or cosine!) The most difficult concept I had to face was only the limiting case of a binomial distribution (which happens to be a normal distribution). The challenging part, is understanding the concept behind the math and bare with the amount of number fudging that they introduce.

I don't pretend to be like Adrian, but I require a little more convincing than "We divide by n-1 because dividing by n makes the number seem a bit too small." It just does not quite sway me to say "Oh okay, I get it".

On the other hand, the first lesson in Rates Trading starts tomorrow. Hopefully it will be more uplifting than the past week..

1 comment:

MiDNiTiE said...

Are you serious? I couldn't stand being in that math class, although I'm sure I didn't get perfect on the test yesterday..