An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory

Paul Samuelson

Annual Review of Financial Economics, 2009, vol. 1, issue 1, 19-35

Abstract: This is a terse account of group creation of modern finance theory; and a sampling of my prosaic autobiographical investing and consulting for nonprofit academies. Eschewing 1900 Bachelier and 1905 Einstein white noise randomness, my martingale version of market micro efficiency invoked no violation of economic law. My attempts to establish pricing theory for options fell a bit short of the Black-Scholes-Merton Holy Grail. For life cycle investing, mathematicians’ maximum growth Kelly criterion was debunked, as were vulgar notions that necessarily riskiness is averaged downward for long-term investors. Popular Markowitz-Tobin quadratic programming was shown to hold generically only for smallest price variations or for unrealistic risk-aversion functions. Because economic history at best obeys only quasi-stationary probabilities, no sure-thing formulas will ever be definable. Excess returns—excess “alphas”—can result only from early new “insider” knowledge, however acquired—legally or illegally. Boo hoo.

JEL-codes: B31 G10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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