RP 1.7 copy: CONTRARY OPINIONS
Headline: Finance is not physics. Risk Professional, October 1999. (Vol 1, No. 7)
Length: 1,900 words
Pictures: photo of Richard Hoppe from RP 1.5 plus some “physics” graphic/montage
Intro:
The mathematics of finance –differential calculus and stochastic statistics –was initially developed to model the physical world rather than markets. Richard Hoppe believes it’s time risk managers paid attention to the fundamental ways in which finance differs from physics and calls for a switch to adaptive models of the market.
Body:
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It is not surprising that a good deal of thought and printer‟s ink have been expended on the problems of Long Term Capital Management. Trades went bad in every way imaginable and the loss were magnified by enormous leverage, culminating in a bailout led by the Federal Rerve Bank of New York.
Yet despite the recent catastrophic failures of the statistical models ud in risk estimation, the fundamental nature of the models does not em to have been called into question. It should be. Becau mathematics can successfully guide a spacecraft in orbit, financial rocket scientists appear to believe that the same mathematics ought to be able to guide portfolios in markets. That belief is ill-founded. The u of current mathematical models of markets to guide speculative trading, support portfolio management and ast allocation, and estimate and manage market risk is at best a misguided business. At worst it is a doomed enterpri.
In July‟s Risk Professional I vi gorously argued that becau the behaviour of markets does not fit the assumptions of the mathematics currently ud to reprent markets, that mathematics is an inappropriate model for market behaviour (Risk Professional, July 1999, page 14). This essay d escribes why that is so. It argues that markets are evolving social systems that are qualitatively different from the ahistorical physical systems that the mathematics was developed to reprent – and as a conquence, modelling markets requires quite different sort of reprentations.
A question of time
The mathematics currently ud in trading control, portfolio management and risk management has
had its genuine success in reprenting physical systems. That mathematics assumes that the system being modelled has dynamics that are indifferent to time. The calculus of infinitesimals, for example, was invented by Newton to model planetary orbital dynamics, which do not change through time. Stochastic statistics and probability calculus found powerful applications in statistical mechanics, modelling the behaviour of near-equilibrium thermodynamic systems who dynamics are also stable through time.
Both approaches disregard time as a variable in reprenting a system‟s dynamics. Stochastic statistics simply discards time by aggregating time-ries data into frequency distributions. The planetary orbital dynamics approach trivialis time by reprenting the system as completely reversible – the mathematics is indifferent to time‟s direction. One can run an o rrery forward or backward with equal facility.
平谷But the behaviour of a market system is not indifferent to time becau markets are not physical systems. Markets are social systems, aggregations of interacting human beings. The manner in which market participants interact depends on their goals, on what they know and expect, and on how they process information and make decisions bad on their goals, knowledge, and expectations at any given moment.
The crucial point is that peoples‟ goals, knowledge and exp ectations change through time. As market participants‟ goals, knowledge and expectations change, the bas for their decisions change. As people get feedback on the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of their decisions, they change the way they process information and make decisions. When the modal information-processing and decision-making behaviours of market participants change, the dynamics of the market they compri change. Market dynamics are epiphenomena of the underlying behavioural dynamics of human market participants. The history of markets and market participants is vitally important to understanding their current behaviour: time flows in just one direction for markets.
Model behaviour
八十岁生日祝福语Whether it is metaphorical, physical, or mathematical, a model is a partial reprentation of the real world. By design models incorporate some features of the real world and ignore others. The model builder‟s hope is that the subt of features included in the model allow it to reprent the real world in the respect s that are relevant to the model builder‟s goals. As the physicist Philip Anderson remarked in his 1977 Nobel Prize lecture: “The art of model-building is the exclusion of real but irrelevant parts of the problem.”
However, Anderson‟s remark is incomplete. A model is not merely a simplified reprentation of a piece of the real world. One must also consider whether the modelling technology itlf introduces unintended properties into its reprentation of the real world. The full-size clay models built by an automobile designer might faithfully reprent the size and shape of the propod design, but do not reprent its weight, physical composition or internal structure.
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Mathematical models similarly reprent some characteristics of the real world and ignore others. Moreover, like the weight of the clay model, a mathematical model may also have properties not prent in the real world phenomenon being modelled. That would be unproblematic if tho properties were irrelevant to the purpos of the model-builder, but unfortunately, some properties and assumptions of mathematical models of markets are directly relevant to their u in risk estimation, but are not true of real markets.
Among tho properties and assumptions of stochastic statistics are the irr elevance of the system‟s history and the normality, stationarity and independence of distributions. Since time ries of market returns are
not Gaussian random walks, a statistical model that assumes that they are is guaranteed to be misle
ading. As with using clay models to test the crash-worthiness of automobile designs, using mathematical models that do not faithfully reprent the relevant properties of markets leads to potentially rious errors.
The role of theory
The modelling technology ud to reprent a domain of phenomena must be governed by a substantive theory in the domain. Mathematics cannot be gratuitously grafted onto numbers in the abnce of theoretical justification. Mathematical models acquire interpretable meaning only when a substantive theory tells us how to map the entities, process and relationships of the real world into the terms and operators of the math. And crucially, a substantive theory allows us to distinguish between relevant properties and tho that are irrelevant.
Differential calculus is a defensible reprentation of certain behaviours of physical systems becau there are well-corroborated theories that justify mapping physical phenomena into the terms and operators of calculus. For instance, there are substantive theoretical grounds for identifying the first derivative of position with respect to time, a mathematical reprentation, with the real velocity of a real physical object moving in real space. But we have no such theory of markets. We have only strained analo gies with physical systems to justify the u of the math.
Simply becau markets provide a plethora of numbers is not a justification for using any particular mathematical model of the real-world process that give ri to tho numbers. The u of a mathematical model of entities and process in markets requires a theory of markets, not merely a theory of mathematics. In finance the latter is often taken to be the former, to the intellectual embarrassment of academics and the professional demi of traders and risk managers. Tenured professors can survive embarrassment but unsuccessful traders and risk managers must find a new occupation, or at least a new employer.
Three criteria
To model markets we need a kind of reprentation – mathematical or otherwi – that meets three criteria. First, since markets are social systems who dynamics change through time, an adequate market reprentation must be able to adapt. It must be able to …learn‟ new dynamics as the collective goals, knowledge, expectations, information-processing and decision-making behaviours of market participants change. The mathematics of physical systems is not adaptive, which rules out physical models of markets.
Second, the reprentation must be theoretically plausible. We must be able to justify the mapping o
喝绿茶有什么好处f market phenomena into the terms and operators of the reprentation. We must be able to give reasons for our choice of market reprentation that are bad on a coherent theory of market participants and their aggregate behaviour, not merely on the convenience or availability of the mathematics.
Finally, we must be able to extract uful information from the reprentation. There must be ways of using the model to guide effective actions in the real world – buying, lling, hedging, allocating. The
model must enable one to make valid statements about the likely behaviour of the market system or it is a sterile academic exerci.
Prediction is a putative property claimed for stochastic statistical models of markets. For example, the RiskMetrics Technical Manual asrts: “An important advantage of assuming that changes in ast prices are distributed normally is that we can make predictions about what we expect to occur.” However, tho predictions can fail spectacularly, as we have en frequently in market history. The normal distribution is ud not becau it reprents the phenomena well – it does not – but becau it has a emingly uful property. But that property is a feature of the model, not of the real world, and predictions bad on invalid models are not merely uless, they can be fatally misleading.
Three alternatives
It is all very well (and discouragingly easy) to critici existing practice – but what are the alternatives? Should we abandon everything in finance since Black-Scholes? There are in fact three alternatives. The first is to attempt to tweak existing models to make them more responsive to changing market dynamics. For example, we could make market risk estimates using short-trailing samples or exponentially weighted trailing samples rather than long unweighted samples. Work in extreme value theory is also an attempt to modify existing approaches to fit real markets.
64卦图However, tinkering with existing approaches does not escape the fundamental problem. The mod els are still fixed-form, ahistorical and non-adaptive – and therefore are inappropriate for systems in which history and the direction of time count.
A cond alternative is for practitioners – traders, risk managers, and portfolio managers – to acknowledge that existing models derived from strained analogies with physics are deceptively dangerous in practice and to simply abandon them. Wagering large sums of money on models that are known to be flawed leads to catastrophic loss, as we have en.
One might better give heavier consideration to risk management basics: carefully controlling leverag
e, limiting the proportion of capital committed to related positions (being acutely aware that the relationships may be non-linear and can change daily or weekly), and always knowing where the exits are, becau the unexpected and improbable is certain to happen eventually.
Taking the critique riously
The third alternative is to take the critique riously and redirect rearch in finance toward devising new market reprentations – not necessarily mathematical reprentations – that meet the criteria suggested above. This alternative demands that one intellectually divorce onelf from existing approaches. It requires shedding the rigid cognitive ts and intellectual prejudices acquired from decades of indoctrination in the primacy of probability theory, stochastic statistics, and differential calculus.
It means developing theories and models that have roots in disciplines like evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology, disciplines in which the history of behavioural phenomena is important in their
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explanations. Since tho disciplines are not heavily mathematicid, the kinds of reprentations and models that they provide will not take the same form as tho borrowed from physics. The models will make heavy u of simulation rather than mathematics. Nevertheless, they will be more 组织推荐
veridical and less deceptive and in the end they will be more uful.
Until the requirements for predictively uful, theoretically justified and adaptive market reprentations are met, mathematical models will continue to nd market participants astray. So long as formal models of market behaviour require that we pretend that markets are reversible or ahistorical physical systems with fixed dynamics, the models will continue to lead risk managers, portfolio managers, and traders down financially dangerous garden paths.
Richard Hoppe spent the 1960s in the aerospace and defence industry before becoming professor of psychology at Kenyon College in Ohio in the 1970s and 1980s. He has been associated with the trading industry since 1990 as a consultant in artificial intelligence and as a trader. Richard is currently a principalatIntelliTrade,amarketriskdecisionsupportfirm,**********************************.
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