Safety in Numbers

Safety in Numbers?

Welcome to my first ever Blog entry, I’ve resisted entering the Blog-o-sphere up to now, but who will speak up for the actuarial users of Windows HPC tools if not me?

My first Post title is pretty clearly a play on words in a number of ways:

1)      Actuaries are the people we rely on to keep us safe and meet our commitments by using numbers to understand the full risk profile. Somebody has to figure out what we can count on in the worst case scenario and our friends in the Actuarial sciences keep us safe with numbers.

2)      The industry places a very high premium on reputation. So…. By nature the Actuary needs to be somewhat cautious in the methods they adopt. For this reason it’s important that the community know that many members will be relying on Windows HPC tools. A larger number of users equals a safer group of users.

3)      With Wall Street leaving something to be desired in the area of full disclosure and the mortgage industry creating a bit of concern about the proper valuation of the underlying assets for CDO’s, there will probably be a strong demand to return to safe and reliable numbers to predict the stability and risk of an investment. Justifying how a number was arrived at will become increasingly important, and the documentation of methods to determine risk will become much more interesting. A well documented number is a safe number.

4)      As the reverberations of the current financial scenario play out, focus will shift from enhanced returns on investment to reliable returns on investments. The credibility of the Actuarial community could become the new foundation of what has been called the Shadow Banking system. People who place faith in reproducible numbers are the safest people to put in charge of our investments.

I spend most of my day looking for Actuarial problems, finding the owners of those problems and explaining to them how Microsoft is interested in making it less expensive to deploy more computers in the execution of stochastic models to better understand risk.

So… If you know any actuaries, point them to me. One thing I’ve learned is that more computers is a good thing, allowing more exploration of the possible outcomes and more

Safety in numbers.