IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/pmschp/978-3-031-47901-4_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Uncertainty: The Necessary Unknowable Road to Speculation

In: The Speculator of Financial Markets

Author

Listed:
  • Daniele D’Alvia

    (Queen Mary University of London)

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to further explore the figure of the speculator from both an epistemological and ontological point of view. Markets are full of risks. This should never worry us though, as risks can and should also be understood as profitable opportunities, especially where we can mitigate against them. But markets are also just as full of uncertainties; unknowns which cannot be quantified as risks, cannot be mitigated against, and which may offer heightened profit opportunities, but which can also spell disaster. The chapter offers a fascinating contemporary overview of risk, uncertainty, and profit by highlighting the importance of a group of thinkers from Galileo Galilei until Pascal and Fermat, Knight and Keynes, and Von Neumann and Thaler who have to enlighten the humankind with the laws of probability, game theory, and behavioural economics. The chapter reminds also of the important lesson of financial history about the role the law plays, or sometimes does not play, in regulating financial markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniele D’Alvia, 2023. "Uncertainty: The Necessary Unknowable Road to Speculation," Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Banking and Financial Institutions, in: The Speculator of Financial Markets, chapter 0, pages 119-169, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:pmschp:978-3-031-47901-4_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-47901-4_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:pmschp:978-3-031-47901-4_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.