What I learned today:

• Shopping while hungry is not cost-effective, but it does result in some interesting impulse purchases. Chunky chocolate peanut butter has entered the house.
• Mean-variance optimization: Look at a portfolio of investments as a whole. Quantify risk and return, and their tradeoffs. Pick the portfolio that minimizes risk (variance) while meeting your return goal (mean). Markowitz, 1952.
• Easier said than done, as constraints (transaction costs, effect of the trades themselves, taxes) change optimal solutions, and error in estimation of parameters is significant and often magnified by the solution process.

What I learned yesterday:

• Rhododendrons are very cool.
• 12 hours out of the house on a Saturday is too much activity for me.

More putting the log in blog: What I learned on May 29th. Late.

• Today I read more about using Python and R for finance. Considering getting Yves Hilpisch’s book or another about using R for quantitative finance. I read about GARCH and portfolio optimization.
• I learned that Robert Shiller’s course on finance is open to all through Yale’s OpenCourse project. Robert Shiller was one of the 2013 Nobel prize winners in economics.
• I spent some time looking at common questions on the new matheducators stackexchange site. I’m glad to see there is finally a place where people teaching math can discuss problems and solutions with each other.
• Math itself: spent some time on Gorbounov and Korff’s paper on quantum integrability.