So you aren't in the same situation as Goldman Sachs, whose (evidently useless) models predicted that the market movements they were seeing were, absurdly, 25 standard deviations away from the mean?

Hugh, is it really true that the WSJ dartboard fund beats professional analysts year after year? Maybe I'm thinking of dogs of the Dow? Urban legends?

(You know, I heard that if you type snopes.com into your browser, you'll get spammed...)

I dunno about the WSJ thing, though I don't doubt it's true about many funds. But I'm so far removed from that kind of market that I couldn't speak with any authority on it.

And matthewr, no, not here; our guys seem more likely to over-regulate than under-. And those Goldman Sachs guys were going wild with faith in models, speaking in tongues and rolling in the aisles like LTCM or something. Hubris rides again.

We are among the select number of American banks that will implement Basel 2 in 2009, though. As the models are stressed and justifications for capital movements are increasingly scrutinized, the work my group does (building a global risk score consolidator under the new Basel rules) will grow in importance within the bank. Economic downturn means job security. There oughtta be a Greek word for that.