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September 23, 2006

Empirical or Stastical ?

I seriously mean a debate between them – Empirical Vs Statistical Proficiency – after I ran across some hot news about the meltdown of the reputable hedge fund called Amaranth LLC - the 9 and a half Billion ($) fund - owing to an unfavourable swing. This appears to be a throwback to the fund Long Term Capital Mgmt which matched the same description in 1998.

The culprit – a well known trader by name Brian Hunter (believed to be one of the highly paid traders in the investment bank circuit). Popular, well read, qualified and ‘reasonably’ experienced who was hired from Deutche Bank and notoriously in charge for orchestrating the poor bet which hit the papers all over. This guy is a physics major from the University of Connecticut and is very well known for his statistical ‘skills’.

See, he is now found guilty of using ‘Statistics’ instead of ‘Experience’!

Statistics Versus Experience - which one would you go with?

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