I recently bought the book The Art and Craft of Problem Solving , by Paul Zeitz. I highly recommend this book if you want to build problem-solving skills. The book explores some problem-solving strategies and tactics, and then presents related problems. The best way of learning to do something is... Continue reading

I am sometimes asked how I find time to do the things I do. Although the real reason is that my wife, my mother and my wife's family help me a lot, there are a few things I have learned myself. Here's one of the best sources. You've probably already... Continue reading

Ironically, I was (somewhat) procrastinating when I found about StayFocusd, a Google Chrome extension that sets a limit on the amount of time that you can spend on a list of websites in a given day. The list comes preconfigured with some of the usual suspects: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Quora.... Continue reading

If you are in a hurry, you can download an Excel template. For more ideas on how to present quantitative information, check Edward Tufte's books or his website. Giving a new meaning to Financial Engineering, when I worked in Corporate Finance I was sometimes asked to build bridges. After the... Continue reading

I wish somebody told me this before I started. But my loss is your gain. There's a reasonable chance that you will have to learn Microeconomics even if you are not getting a Ph.D in Finance or Economics, as my friends in Accounting and Information Sciences can attest. There's a... Continue reading

An example of price discrimination: a few books, including "A Course in Game Theory" and "Lectures in Microeconomics" are freely available on Martin Osborne and Ariel Rubinstein's website. Registration is required, but the books are of good quality and really free. As I usually read the preface of books and... Continue reading

I wrote a tutorial on how to implement some portfolio optimizers in R for a class. The tutorial implements three types of factor models: A Fama-French three factor model An industry cross-sectional model A principal component analysis model This is for instructional purposes only: it's not a software for you... Continue reading

I recently had to prepare a paper about the impacts of the Dodd-Frank legislation for a class. Rather randomly, I chose the Durbin Amendment, a provision that increases regulation on the debit card market. What I learned about the debit and credit card market was fascinating. The amendment passed into... Continue reading

It is very possible that many of my Managerial Economics students will scour the web for class notes (instead of using the course website). And maybe, just maybe, after spending some time on Wikipedia's article on Managerial Economics and in some random essay mills, they may find the lecture notes... Continue reading

via www.youtube.com The part about the CPI is priceless. (sorry about the cheap pun!) Continue reading

via xkcd.com Nothing more annoying for a mathematician (of sorts) than the "up to 15% or more"... Continue reading

I explore copulas by creating a model with four funds that track market indexes for stocks, bonds, dollar and commodities. I then use the model to generate simulated values and test the performance of a model portfolio using the real returns and the simulated returns to calculate the value at... Continue reading