I had a chance to see Myron Scholes speak in Toronto yesterday. Scholes: from Black-and fame. The option guy. That Nobel Prize guy. (A Canadian by the way!)
Before I completed my undergrad in Finance, I studied a lot of nerd stuff in high school: physics, organic chemistry, math. In those fields you learn about guys like Galileo, Avogadro, Fibonacci. They all had one thing in common: they were all around before I was born. (And spoke Italian.)
When I started learning about finance, I immediately adopted the same thinking for the names I read in the text books: Modigliani, Miller, Merton, Markowitz, Friedman, Drucker, Black and Scholes. I was surprised to learn at that time that these guys were still around.
So there he stands at the Toronto Board of Trade, looking sharpe (sic) with a great suntan and nice hair speaking to a crowd of groupies like he was some kind of finance rock star.
He explained we should embrace uncertainty. Risk management is a misnomer and we should change our mindset and think of it as “managing under uncertainty”. But the key thing he noted is what Risckzar always advocates: risk management is more than just a bunch of values on a report; it’s about people and the conversations that the risk report generates. If we don’t learn something from the report, then it’s just a number on a page.
Excellent viewpoint and article. Agree with you completely if risk management report doesn’t generate a conversation, no action is going to be taken and it is going to be rolled under the carpet.
Sonia