Buttonwood THE options gambit

摘要

IN 1993 Nigel Short, a British chess player, became an unlikely TV star. This was a consequence of the staging in London of a chess match between Mr Short and Garry Kasparov, the world's best player. Channel 4 carried highlights. Sustaining interest was a challenge, though. Two men hunched over a board is not a great spectacle. A bigger problem was the baffling complexity of top-level chess. Even a club-level player could not easily work out who was winning. This brings us to a more recent battle of the brainboxes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Cliff Asness, two high-level thinkers on finance, had a forthright exchange of views on social media about the efficacy of buying options to hedge a portfolio of risky shares. Mr Taleb, author of "The Black Swan" and adviser to Universa Investments, an options specialist, says it is the only robust way. Mr Asness, founder of AQR Capital Management, says there are better methods.