“Out of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most …” Mark Twain Think back carefully about your career – for those of us who have been around for long enough, what has really changed in the last twenty/thirty years? Personally, I find the flow of information astounding and that certainly stands […]
“My hamster died last night … it fell asleep at the wheel.” – Anonymous Homeostasis refers to some regulating process that keeps an outcome close to a target by compensating for external disturbances; core bodily temperature is an example of being homeostatically maintained within narrow limits despite major variations in the external temperature. In essence, […]
Volatility and the Skunk By Eben Maré, Head: Fixed Income at Absa Asset Management and Associate Professor, University of Pretoria “What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself” – Abraham Lincoln Investors typically equate volatility (or more technically the standard deviation of asset returns) with risk. In this regard, the CBOE Volatility Index, […]
Risk Profiling, Risk Management and Investments by Eben Maré, Head of Fixed Income, ABSA Asset Management IBM recently estimated that we generate approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily (one followed by 18 zeros – roughly the equivalent of 57.5 billion 32GB iPads). The flow of information has had a profound impact on the financial […]
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Unintended Consequences in Finance by Eben Maré, Associate Professor, University of Pretoria Central banks have their jobs cut out for them! They measure a set of economic variables (such as inflation and employment), on a historical basis, and use those results combined with monetary policy to influence the future behaviour […]
Volatility – Ubiquitous, Yet Evasive? by Eben Maré, Portfolio Manager, Stanlib In this article we discuss aspects of asset class volatility. We look specifically at the VIX index and some of its properties – VIX has become very popular in the media of late, especially with low historical levels being printed. We try to understand […]
The Importance of US Real Yields for Relative Equity Performance by Eben Maré, Head of Absolute Return Funds, Stanlib, and Chris Holdsworth, Quantitative Strategist, Investec Securities Real interest rates have been negative in the US following the 2008 sub-prime crisis. A similar experience holds in many countries, including emerging markets such as South Africa. If […]
