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Alsadius comments on Mathematicians and the Prevention of Recessions - Less Wrong
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The closest thing to finance from first principles is just to assume the EMH, use the CAPM theory to constuct a market portfolio, and practice a policy of pure commission/tax avoidance. Finance from first principles is incredibly boring - the only way to make it interesting is to start getting into second-order effects.
Finance != data analysis.
The comment was "lean on data analysis", as in "lean on data analysis to do finance". Yes, the analysis itself is not "finance" per se, but most of the data analysis done in finance is simple math that gets used in complex ways. It's easy enough to calculate P/E, but figuring out whether that implies you wanting to buy or sell is a much harder question. About the only way to use first principles to actually make buy/sell decisions is, as I said, to use the CAPM and just embrace your ignorance.
That seems a little extreme; presumably there's a difference between using statistical tests as a heuristic you don't understand, and using statistical tests in a well-understood way, even if you're not deriving finance from first principles.
Also, CAPM isn't actually true (i.e. assumptions never hold in the real world), whereas statistics is.