...or Scholes and LTCM

tigertrader 

...or Scholes and LTCM

That was a different story. They just believed in their false models relying on Gaussian distributions, ignoring the importance of Fat Tails and underestimating the frequence of so called 7-sigma events. Should have listened to Mandelbrot and guy like Sornette.

And they used too much leverage to survive their fixed income arbitrage trades that were relying on mean reversion. Otherwise they would have exited many of their positions with a profit after things calmed down.

the moral of the story...

never ignore the importance of Fat Tails...lol

tigertrader 

the moral of the story... never ignore the importance of Fat Tails...lol

In memoriam Benoit Mandelbrot:

Without fat tails markets would be random and there would be little incentive to trade. But Levy beat Gauss on this one, so we are lucky and continue playing around.