STREET DOGS: Joseph and Noah effects
Joseph effects occur when markets are continuously evolving; Noah effects are cataclysms
Wild price swings, business failures, windfall trading profits — these are key phenomena. In all their drama and power, they should matter most to bankers, regulators and investors. — Benoit Mandelbrot
Your mutual fund’s annual report, for example, may contain a measure of risk (usually something called beta). It would indeed be useful to know just how risky your fund is, but this number won’t tell you. Nor will any of the other quantities spewed out by the pseudoscience of finance: standard deviation, the Sharpe ratio, variance, correlation, alpha, value at risk, even the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. The problem with all these measures is that they are built upon the statistical device known as the bell curve. This means they disregard big market moves: They focus on the grass and miss out on the (gigantic) trees. Rare and unpredictably large deviations like the collapse of Enron’s stock price in 2001 or the spectacular rise of Cisco’s in the 1990s have a dramatic impa...
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