About Karl Strobl:

In my working life, I am now COO and co-founder of Praedium Consulting Malta (PCM for short), an Explosive-Remnants-of-War Risk-Management company, which also owns MAT Kosovo, a globally renowned mine action and EOD school. On the side, I am a board member at financial and non-financial businesses in Malta,  and I teach, both at University and at private institutions. I was in charge of global investment businesses for many years, including global equity trading at Deutsche Bank’s Asset Management Division, structured products globally both at Deutsche Bank and ABN AMRO Bank, and retirement solutions globally. Before then, I was a theoretical particle physicist and applied mathematician, teaching at Sussex University.

I love books (history, philosophy, science, novels, economics), music across the board (world, metal, blues, choral, etc etc), maths, games and game theory, puzzles, and physics.

I studied applied maths in Cambridge (PhD), and theoretical physics at Vanderbilt Univ. (M.S.), and Vienna Technical University.

I still love maths, and actively try to convey insights from complex systems studies, evolutionary game theory, self-organised criticality, extreme value theory, statistical modelling and significance tests, genetic algorithms. and emergence. For fun, I spy out everyday misuses of statistics.

For a full profile, visit www.linkedin.com/in/karlstrobl

to get in touch, e-mail me karl.strobl@gmail.com

About the Blog:

Like most blogs (I guess), it started as an experiment. I didn’t have a ‘mission’ with the blog, but I felt I had things to say. Just having left Wall Street and the City, I started to write about what I thought were some of the less obvious dangers in the financial and political system: Sustainability of government finances under demographic pressures, the environment, inter-generational equity, fiscal stability, longevity, energy, resources, and the inner workings of the monetary system. Basically issues I encountered in my international financial career. I felt I suddenly had the time to think about them properly, and the freedom to talk about them perhaps more openly and take more inputs from connections I had made during my life at Wall Street.

The approach I take to these topics is hopefully a little ‘different’, colored as it is by my professional backgrounds as a theoretical physicist, pretty deep exposure to Wall Street, and now teaching how to deal with deleterious but non-measurable risks in all domains of life including war and post-war.

Recently, as PCM (and with it the war in Ukraine) kept me super busy, I have blogged considerably less. I’m back in a totally new but focused role in my professional life, I’ve had to learn a lot of things that were completely new to me. At the same time, my ability to proselytize and my ability to bring you news from ‘insiders’ in the financial or political system has of course waned as well. I’m no longer so directly connected to these insiders.

My main thoughts, however, still do revolve around the Black Swans, the events that may happen but which nobody expects. They revolve around complexity, and the unmeasurable risks that can kill us. How could it be otherwise, when at PCM the main things we deal with are the vagaries of wars and the vagaries of the items of unexploded or abandoned ordnance which our clients/students deal with?

What matters is to not get wiped out when the unexpected happens, instead of just trying to get it right on most normal days. More important than being ‘right’ in forecasting what’s going to happen, is to be prepared for whatever might happen. Anti-fragility, as Nassim Taleb calls it.

Life is certain to throw things at you that you can’t plan for. Do you want specific examples? There are plenty, at least one in each blog post 🙂