[Bobblehead]

A couple interesting articles in the current issue of Wired.

The first talks about the equation traders were using to try evaluate risk:

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant

Another talks about transarency in the financial industry:

The SEC's public document database, Edgar, now catalogs 200 gigabytes of filings each year—roughly 15 million pages of text—up from 35 gigabytes a decade ago.

But the volume of data obscures more than it reveals; financial reporting has become so transparent as to be invisible. Answering what should be simple questions—how secure is my cash account? How much of my bank's capital is tied up in risky debt obligations?—often seems to require a legal degree, as well as countless hours to dig through thousands of pages of documents. Undoubtedly, the warning signs of our current crisis—and the next one!—lie somewhere in all those filings, but good luck finding them.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/maga...7-03/wp_reboot

I went to an XBRL convention 6 or 7 years ago. Interesting stuff that was in its infancy then.