Help! My Finance textbook has a sense of humour!

Here are some 'gems'.

"Volatility is measured as the standard deviation of annual returns. This last sentence is an example of the sort of statistical jargon that is designed to ensure that quantitative analysts keep their jobs."

"Recall that securities are priced on the basis of the actual number of days in the year in Australia (and many other cricket-playing countries), whereas in the United States, for instance, securities are priced as though there were 360 days in a year. Note that conventions are not necesarily correct chronologically or mathematically, and cricket, while providing an answer for most of life's problems, probably has little to do with the 365-day convention."

"Annuities have a long history. One interesting early annuity was the tontine. Paticipants in a tontine would receive lifetime annual payments in exchange for each making a single payment. As participants died, their payments were redistributed to increase the payments to the surviving participants. The incentive to hasten the demise of other participants was unfortunately, only too evident in some family-based tontines."

"Every transaction eventually has to be settled, whether through cash, through electronic systems or by a visit by Joey Soprano. The payments system has evolved to implement a more orderly process of payments than that envisaged by Mr. Soprano."

"Borrowers come from Mars, while lenders come from Venus."

"The flow of funds from surplus to deficit units is vital to growth an economic development. Money kept under a Scrooge's mattress just produces an uncomfortable night's sleep."

Yeah.