That is the title of a webinar I delivered this morning on behalf of Kristal.AI, a company that I’ve been working with for a while now. I spoke about utility functions, and how they can be used in portfolio optimisation.
This is related to the work that I’ve been doing for Kristal, and lies at the boundaries between quantitative finance and behavioural finance, and in fact I spoke about utility functions (combined with Monte Carlo methods) as being a great method to unify quantitative and behavioural finance.
Interactive Brokers (who organised the webinar) recorded the thing, and you can find the recording here.
I think the webinar went well, though I’m not very sure since there was no feedback. This was by design – the webinar was a speaker-only broadcast, and audience weren’t allowed to participate except in terms of questions that were directly sent to me.
In the first place, webinars are hard to do since it feels like talking to an empty room – there is no feedback, not even nods or smiles, and you don’t know if people are listening. In most “normal” webinars, the audience can interject by raising their hands, and you can try make it interactive. The format used here didn’t permit such interaction which made it seem like I was talking into thin air.
Also, the Mac app of the webinar tool used didn’t seem particularly well optimised. I couldn’t share a particular screen from my laptop (like I couldn’t say “share only my PDF, nothing else” which is normal in most online chat tools), and there are times where I’ve inadvertently exposed my desktop to the full audience (you can see it on the recording).
Anyways, I think I’ve spoken about something remotely interesting, so give it a listen. My “main speech” only takes around 20-25 minutes. And if you want to know more about utility functions and behavioural economics, i recommend this piece by John Cochrane to you.