Good quantitative finance can be summed up as the art of leaving things out, plus the art of selecting the right tools. -- Julian Shaw ( Permal Group)

From a childhood in Colombia, to a life in the States, Janet Lustgarten’s personal motto might as well be “no guts, no glory.” Lustgarten’s father was a men’s suit manufacturer in Colombia when new political pressures brought change to business and the way factories were run. “It was a difficult time,” she recalled, “and my family thought we’d live a better life in the United States and moved to Florida. We were the classic family coming to America looking for security and opportunity”

Andrew B. Weisman on MVO(Mean Variance Optimization); The use of this technique, in combination with the informationless performance-enhancement techniques that are frequently employed (knowingly or unknowingly) by professional investors, tends to produce portfolios that are optimized to produce maximal future period losses; systematically denigrated from a liquidity standpoint; and actively inclusive of managers that make use of money management strategies that imply catastrophic losses of capital. It is my firm belief that unless Harry Markowitz had a truly ironic sense of humor, this was not his intent.

For majority, writing something means firing up a word document( MS Office or Open Office) and typing in stuff. Sometimes we don’t pause and think about the way we are actually preparing the document. We write something, we format it using the menu items or hot keys, then we write something, then we format etc. This goes on until we are done with preparing the document. This process is virtually in an auto-pilot mode for most of us.

The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude. ~Voltaire