Apologies, I don’t often come to this forum and only now saw your response. Fair point on teaching the wrong lesson. But to BofAs defence they had a really good workshop for us interns on betting under uncertainty. We had to answer various questions like how long is the Nile. The answer has to be a range and we could set it ourselves. We could put 0 − 10^99 on every answer and get all answers correct. Nobody got more than half right (mostly top grade ivy League grads) or so which really made me humble to overconfidence. They really did try to hammer in proper risk adjustment. That said, how traders bonuses were tied to their profit and loss was not ideal i think—i am pretty sure there were no negative bonuses. The bonuses were like the portfolio competition!
Apologies, I don’t often come to this forum and only now saw your response. Fair point on teaching the wrong lesson. But to BofAs defence they had a really good workshop for us interns on betting under uncertainty. We had to answer various questions like how long is the Nile. The answer has to be a range and we could set it ourselves. We could put 0 − 10^99 on every answer and get all answers correct. Nobody got more than half right (mostly top grade ivy League grads) or so which really made me humble to overconfidence. They really did try to hammer in proper risk adjustment. That said, how traders bonuses were tied to their profit and loss was not ideal i think—i am pretty sure there were no negative bonuses. The bonuses were like the portfolio competition!