Amar Omerovic

[betraidx @betraidx]

A broke Italian gambler in 1560 wrote a short manual on how to win at dice. Nobody in finance read it for four hundred years.

The nine-trillion-dollar insurance industry runs on his equation.

His name was Girolamo Cardano. The book was called Liber de Ludo Aleae. He scribbled it in Milan to settle a card debt. Every dollar of premium ever collected on Earth is a footnote to that scribble.

Nobody connected the dots until 1996. A ninety-year-old man in New York wrote a book called Against the Gods and traced every modern risk model back to Cardano's manual. Wall Street called him the historian of risk.

His name was Peter Bernstein. In 2008 a small production company filmed him for thirteen minutes. He walked through the entire five-hundred-year arc. Cardano to Pascal to Fermat to Black-Scholes.

Then he stopped and said the industry had built glass towers on the back of an idea a broke gambler scribbled to shave the house edge.

He died the following summer. Age ninety.

There are only four ways to make money. Labor. Capital. Arbitrage. Insurance. Insurance is the oldest and the least visible. Every actuary on Earth still prices catastrophe risk with Cardano's framework.

The video is thirteen minutes long. Free on YouTube. Twenty-nine thousand people have watched it.