FNB has confirmed that they will be pulling approvals for home loans on a large scale. Many seem to have been caught by surprise. Fools. To an outsider, it appears that FNB made a mistake in underestimating the trouble in the property market when they first gave these approvals. Their estimates of property price growth,…
Marketing is naively thought to be mostly art and very little science. While it is true that there is are elements of inspiration and creativity and passion involved, the balance of an effective strategic marketing role is heavily in favour of science. As a further point to consider, I put forward the proposition that much…
This is a continuation ofa post considering the relevance of an individual investment product development position to a career in actuarial consulting. An old contact mailed me a couple of days ago asking my view on two possible actuarial positions. He was interested in whether either would be suitable preparation for a consulting or actuarial…
Was enjoying coffee and scones at a Woolies cafe recently. Well, actually I wasn’t enjoying the scones because they had run out. They’ve been making a habit of running out of scones recently. Strange. But the amusing part of this story came from reading the coffee “Things you didn’t know” table thing. Point number 1:…
Up, up and out of reach Food prices are high and getting higher. Some of this can be blamed on the alternate use of crops for biofuel, and some due to the shifting of production towards more biofuel friendly crops. Whether this is a good thing or not would need more discussion than I can…
GDP growth below expectations and Standard Bank is likely to miss it’s already previously downwards revised earnings target. We can’t forecast. Our biases, overconfidence, wild anchoring on anything out there, herding instincts so as not to be wrong and obvious about and general inability to understand how little we know about the future are clear. So if we can’t forecast, and so many of our decisions depend on knowing the future, who are we kididng?
Behavioural finance is no longer a “new idea”. It has entered mainstream finance education through CFA, Business Schools, even actuarial exams (ST5 for UK and South African actuaries). Some of the biggest lessons revolve around how bad we as a species are at making decisions in the face of uncertainty. Emotional biases, overconfidence, loss aversion,…
This article isn’t new, although it seems to have some pretty current info (about Excel 2007, for example). Worth a read for anyone who uses spreadsheets for everything, but doesn’t want to touch a database, Mathematica / Maple / Maxima / Octave / Matlab or R / S / S+ etc. http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/spreadsheet_addiction.html And yes, I…
