I must state at the outset that this post is inspired by the second chapter of Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise. In that chapter, which is about election forecasting, Silver draws upon the old Russian parable of the hedgehog and the fox. According to that story, the fox knows several tricks while the…
Why standard deviation is not a good measure of volatility
Most finance textbooks, at least the ones that are popular in Business Schools, use standard deviation as a measure of volatility of a stock price. In this post, we will examine why it is not a great idea. To put it in one line, the use of standard deviation loses information on the ordering of…