Recent Articles

Powerball’s Jackpot is over 1 bn : Use Excel Pivot to not share it.

Did you know that your favorite Powerball number might be everyone else’s favorite too? Discover how the numbers you choose could mean sharing your jackpot with strangers. In German Lotto, this is even more crucial, because the payout of German Lotto depends on the number of winners in each cathegory. Introduction Many people dream of […]

Hans-Werner Sinn on climate protection: 6 measures really help the earth

The Green Thunderstorm The Federal Republic of Germany wants to set a good example in climate policy, but is not making any significant contribution to cooling the earth with its economic self-sacrifice. An essay on right and wrong climate policy. I find that many arguments from Hans-Werner Sinn have not been discussed properly, yet. Therefore, […]

Mega Trend Climate Change

The most dominating factor in the long run for the economy is climate change. If we do not take radical action, in 30 years, the world will lose about half a trillion US$ per year due to climate change ($479 billion). By then 150 million people have to leave their home due to sea level […]

Speed-up of MATLAB: Just-in-time compiler JIT

Sometimes, MATLAB seems to be slow and inefficient. MATLAB is great for prototyping and interactive analysis, but sometimes execution speed is crucial. The MathWorks proposes to vectorized your code. Recently, I found that this is not always the best solution for higher speed. A better solution comes from the sparsely documented JIT Compiler which was already introduced […]

25 Years German DAX: A success story?

On July 1st, 1988 German DAX was published. It was not only an index of the German stock market: It introduced a new methodology computing a stock market index. The German DAX was the first popular index to include weights according to market capitalization and calculating returns including dividends. Now, after 25 years it is […]

Historical performance lies! Beware of survivor bias.

Often you find studies how well a specific fund or trading strategy has performed. You must be aware of the fact that basically all studies based on historical data lie – or at least do not tell the full story. There are two highly underestimated effects: Survivor bias and fat tails. Both effects make poor […]

Financial Modelling (with Matlab Source): A great new book

Book Cover

Joerg Kienitz and Daniel Wetterau present “Financial Modelling: Theory, Implementation and Practice with MATLAB Source”, a great resource on state-of-the-art models in financial mathematics. The authors try to bridge the gap between current research topics and an implementation which can be applied in the real world. That means the authors are neither afraid of practical […]

Quandl: A Wikipedia for Numerical Data

Red quandl.com alpha logo

For data analysts like myself, one of the most useful pages on any blog resides on this website. The comprehensive list of data sites Andreas put together is indispensable because finding numerical data online, even though it is abundant, is so difficult and time consuming.