Beverley Slopen Literary Agency

Ron Dembo
and
Andrew Freeman

THE RULES OF RISK:
An Investor's Guide
(new US title)

SEEING TOMORROW
Taking Control of Risk

Seeing Tomorrow is a brilliant, ground-breaking book on risk - how we think about it and how we can manage it better. Financial risk pervades our daily lives. Buying a lottery ticket, acquiring a mortgage, choosing a mutual fund or an insurance policy, all involve decisions about risk. Managing risk is essential for every business. It also is a key element in formulating social policy.

Assessing risk involves many factors. Often, we are rooted in the past, but risk is about events that will happen in the future. We each have different appetites for risk. A central factor is Regret. People feel regret when they suffer negative outcomes. They will go to great lengths to minimize it. The concept of Regret influences our decisions and shapes our appetite for risk.

Seeing Tomorrow advances current thinking about risk and provides tools to grapple with the concept. It bravely offers new definitions and suggests four central elements for managing risk. These are time horizons, the use of scenarios to project possible outcomes in the future, risk measures, and benchmarks. Most investors and businesses choose inappropriate benchmarks and therefore, are unable to measure performance correctly. The final chapter offers a succinct list of risk management rules.

Blending psychology, philosophy, mathematics, and history, this work is a marvel of clarity, accessible to the general reader and informative for the specialist.

John Wiley US/UK /98
McClelland & Stewart Can/98
Gerling Akademie Verlag/98
University Press China/99
Japan/2000

Ron S. Dembo, a mathematician, is the leading thinker on risk. He is founder, President and CEO of Algorithmics Incorporated, a provider of innovative risk management software for many of the world's major financial institutions. Based in Toronto, Algorithmics has offices in London, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and Johannesburg.

Andrew Freeman is an award-winning journalist with the influential journal The Economist, for which he wrote pioneering coverage of risk management. Born in Australia, he is a graduate of Balliol College,Oxford University.