The recent controversies involving Consob and its president Vegas regarding the need to include, a proposal that I have always shared, in the prospectuses the so-called probabilistic scenarios aimed at informing savers on the probability of obtaining the desired return, raises a more general problem not only on the degree of financial education of Italian savers - which everyone invokes, but which unfortunately does not come down from heaven - but above all on the (scarce) willingness of the heads of financial institutions to equip the saver with simple cognitive tools on the multiple opportunities for choices of investment, suitably weighted with the many multiple risk probabilities.
But today, due to the development of information technologies in a context of globalization, the world of information has radically and rapidly changed. The sources of information relevant to the financial markets and savers have multiplied dramatically making it almost impossible to reorder them in the assessments of the saver himself: the Internet with its financial portals which inform the public almost in real time and on a worldwide or which offers (usually via e-mail) gadgets for "do-it-yourself" trading (does anyone check them?); the advertising programs of financial product issuers which refer to the accurate reading of the prospectuses, just as pharmaceutical companies do by referring to leaflets, with the difference that the drugs are controlled by specialized public bodies unlike financial products (it is no coincidence that they are also defined "toxic"; public institutions that disseminate statistical information on market trends; sponsors who assist issuers in the initial placement phase on the primary market; auditing firms belonging to multifunctional groups; rating agencies owned by subjects operating on financial markets, etc. It is obvious that all this is difficult to summarize in the head of the saver.
But unlike the latter, financial institutions elaborate, on the basis of statistical and probabilistic models which in turn use the historical series of information collected in colossal databases and big data, - and God forbid otherwise - they calculate the likely return and risk associated with each product. But such processing remains closed in the back office computers, where statisticians and mathematicians process the complex algorithms aimed at defining the risk for the issuer of the various financial products to be offered to the public. Conversely, this risk also weighs on the saver's shoulders. However, it is true that those who hoped that the saver would also be provided with the complex algorithms just mentioned would only increase the confusion in the mind of the poor fellow, if anything without even the most elementary statistical and algebraic notions.
It is equally true that the legislation does not help educate and take into consideration the probability of the occurrence of financial events. In fact, I tried to trace, with the modest means offered by my PC, by clicking on "find", whether the terms "probability" or "probability" had space in the Consolidated Finance Law. But both lemmas do not appear in the TUF, indicating that the concept of probability has never arisen in the reflections and minds of the legislator and its so-called experts in the field of financial markets, dominated instead always and everywhere by the uncertainty that cannot be eliminated with even more complete information. Good information is a necessary but not sufficient condition for correctly informing savers: Too much information equals no information. The same lemma "calculation" is degraded to the elementary use of "sum" and "subtraction" in the case of the "calculation" of the numbers of voters and those present in some corporate meetings.
But there may be a way out thanks to information technology. In fact, the practice followed for years of electoral exit polls and projections of voting results has long accustomed the Italian citizen to well understand the exquisitely probabilistic concept offered by the so-called "forks" (i.e. confidence interval) within which the probabilities are placed that the successful candidate wins. They are two simple numbers that everyone is by now accustomed to understanding and evaluating with accuracy.
Mathematical and statistical models applied to financial markets also produce "forks" (confidence intervals) on the probability of default of a financial product: and I repeat: God forbid if it weren't like this. Perhaps, taking a cue from the current controversy over Consob's conduct, a law imposing "forks" in the information prospectuses could help savers and the proper functioning of the financial market, which in any case will never be "zero risk". , just as every probabilistic evaluation teaches.
