Sage Finance and Quantitative Analytics

Quantative Finance is a great area for Sage:

Sage includes much of the underlying infrastructure needed to do Quantative Financial Analysis
Quantative Finance stresses areas not heavily used currently by the Sage Community
- Signal Processing
- Statistics
- Parallel Computing
Finance is important

Sage provides a vehicle for the somewhat opaque world of Finance to be presented in a natural way to mathematicians, scientists and engineers. The efforts we're undertaking in this area include:

Educational Materials wherein notebooks usable by educators and those wishing to self educate can learn finance and economics using an approach devoid of unnecessary ambiguity typically associated with the area
Infrastructure to provide live and historical market data for economic, financial, and market analysis
Implementation of the latest published techniques using numeric and symbolic analysis which should minimize the effort necessary to make contributions
Dispelling commonly held myths and untruths by exposing the mathematical underpinnings of finance enabling a wider community to make useful contributions and be in a better position to manage personal finances

Economic Fundamentals

"The delusion that a crisis of excess debt can be solved by creating more debt is at the heart of the Great Repression. Yet that is precisely what most governments propose to do."
-- Niall Ferguson, The Australian, Feburary 28, 2009

"This is going to be one of the worst economic downturns since the Great Depression."
--Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, April 25, 2008" 

"We're clearly on an imprudent and unsustainable fiscal path. Our current liabilities and unfunded commitments as of the end of the last fiscal year amounted to over $43 trillion, up to $13 trillion in one year alone."
--David Walker, U.S. Comptroller General (April 11, 2005)

"...the U.S. government is, indeed, bankrupt, insofar as it will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this context, are current and future generations to whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised future net payments of various kinds..." 
--Professor L. Kotlikoff, for the U. S. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. (July, 2006)

"If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?" -- Will Rogers

"Ignorance Is Expensive" -- Erik Epp

"Bit by bit, from a bad seed a big but sickly tree is built with glue, nails, screws and scaffolding. Conventional economics assumes the financial system is a linear, continuous, rational machine and these false assumptions are built into the risk models used by many of the world's banks. As a result, the odds of financial ruin in a free global market economy have been grossly underestimated. By using such methods there is no limit to how bad a bank's losses can get. Its own bankruptcy is the least of the worries; it will default on its obligations to other banks - and so the losses will spread from one inter-linked financial house to another. Only forceful action by regulators to put a firewall round the sickest firms will stop the crisis spreading. But bad news tends to come in flocks and a bank that weathers one crisis may not survive a second or a third." 
--Benoit Mandelbrot - The Misbehavior of Markets (August, 2004)