Reading Time: 4 minutes Human longevity is always somewhat of a double-edged sword for those tasked with paying a defined benefit pension: increases in healthy lifespan are of course welcome from a human perspective, but make the job of providing a pension for life that much harder. And longevity has been very hard to forecast with any accuracy: from … More Living Longer, and Prospering
Reading Time: 4 minutes In finance 101 you learn all about the two types of risk: systematic (market) and non-systematic (idiosyncratic) risk, but conventional teaching tends to ignore a third risk – Behavioral risk, which can be the most important. >> From @danielcrosby ‘s excellent book The Behavioral Investor which provides both a new taxonomy of behavioral biases from … More The Mis-behaving Investor
Reading Time: 3 minutes Authors Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie have put together an excellent and readable taxonomy of the “bugs” that can afflict group decision making and cause groups to blunder in their book Wiser. In the first part of this blog I discussed their dissection of the causes of group decision making failure. How can we make … More [Books] Wiser (part 2) – getting past groupthink to better outcomes
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’m sure you can picture the scene. A group sits down to make a critically important decision. Much discussion follows. One person after another lays out their views, lots of points are made. There are some clear areas of agreement. Nods all round. The answer starts to become clear. With a few changes a consensus … More [Books] Wiser – how group decisions can let us down
Reading Time: 7 minutes So this is about strategies and tactics to understand and get past I am right you are wrong type situations and get to better outcomes. Specifically I am going to address this through three vignettes. But before we start I’d like to ask you to picture a recent example of a disagreement. I’m sure you can … More I am right, you are wrong…
Reading Time: 6 minutes What I read this summer Stumbling on Happiness The pursuit of happiness is built into the very definition of human desire. We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days… volatilityviewpoint.w… The Inevitable From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, … More What I’m reading summer 2017
Reading Time: 4 minutes McKinsey just published an excellent and comprehensive paper covering how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can deliver real value for business. tl;dr The only issue – at 80 pages it’s a lot to read. A lot of the use cases focus on retail, energy and education, one angle I find particularly are the read-across of these examples into … More One minute guide to real-world AI implementation
Reading Time: 2 minutes My most-read blog posts of 2016 were: 1. Why Anthony Hilton is wrong about DB pensions This post, responding to the misguided (in my view) viewpoints of London Evening Standard journalist Anthony Hilton in September garnered by far the most views of any of my blogs this year (around 1400 views). An extended version of … More 2016’s Most Popular
Reading Time: 1 minute DB Pensions News September 2016
Reading Time: 2 minutes The future of asset and wealth management? A thoroughly excellent event was organised by Level39 in London on 25 May 2015, featuring speakers from all the key players and analysts in the fairly nascent European roboadvisor scene and around 250 delegates. My five top takeaways are below, or you can read my storify story here. … More Roboadvisor Europe 2016 – The Future?
