Tag: matt levine

Matt Levine describes my business idea

When I was leaving the big bank I was working for (I keep forgetting whether this blog is anonymous or not, but considering that I’ve now mentioned it on my LinkedIn profile (and had people congratulate me “on the new job”), I suppose it’s not anonymous any more) in 2011, I didn’t bother looking for a new job.

I was going into business, I declared. The philosophy (that’s a word I’ve learnt to use in this context by talking to Venture Capitalists) was that while Quant in investment banking was already fairly saturated, there was virgin territory in other industries, and I’d use my bank-honed quant skills to improve the level of reasoning in these other industries.

Since then things have more or less gone well. I’ve worked in several sectors, and done a lot of interesting work. While a lot of it has been fairly challenging, very little of it has technically been of a level that would be considered challenging by an investment banking quant. And all this is by design.

I’ve long admired Matt Levine for the way in which he clearly explains fairly complicated finance stuff in his daily newsletter (that you can get delivered to your inbox for free),  and more or less talking about finance in an entertaining model. I’ve sometimes mentioned that I’ve wanted to grow up to be like him, to write like him, to analyse like him and all that.

And I find that in yesterday’s newsletter he clearly encapsulates the idea with which I started off when I quit banking in 2011. He writes:

A good trick is, find an industry where the words “Monte Carlo model” make you sound brilliant and mysterious, then go to town.

This is exactly what I set out to do in 2011, and have continued to do since then. And you’d be amazed to find the number of industries where “Monte Carlo model” makes you sound brilliant and mysterious.

Considering the difficulties I’ve occasionally had in communicating to people what exactly I do, I think I should adopt Levine’s line to describe my work. I clearly can’t go wrong that way.

 

A misspent career in finance

I spent three years doing finance – not counting any internships or consulting assignments. Between 2008 and 2009 I worked for one of India’s first High Frequency Trading firms. I worked as a quant, designing intra-day trading strategies based primarily on statistical arbitrage.

Then in 2009, I got an opportunity to work for the big daddy of them all in finance – the Giant Squid. Again I worked as a quant, designing strategies for selling off large blocks of shares, among others. I learnt a lot in my first year there, and for the first time I worked with a bunch of super-smart people. Had a lot of fun, went to New York, played around with data, figured that being good at math wasn’t the same as being good at data – which led me to my current “venture”.

But looking back, I think I mis-spent my career in finance. While quant is kinda sexy, and lets you do lots of cool stuff, I wasn’t anywhere close to the coolest stuff that my employers were doing. Check out this, for example, written by Matt Levine in relation to some tapes regarding Goldman Sachs and the Fed that were published yesterday:

The thing is:

  • Before this deal, Santander had received cash (from Qatar), and agreed to sell common shares (to Qatar), but wasn’t getting capital credit from its regulators.
  • After this deal, Santander had received cash (from Qatar), and agreed to sell common shares (to Qatar), and was getting capital credit from its regulators, and Goldman was floating around vaguely getting $40 million.

This is such brilliantly devious stuff. Essentially, every bad piece of regulation leads to a genius trade. You had Basel 2 that had lesser capital requirements for holding AAA bonds rather than holding mortgages, so banks had mortgages converted into Mortgage Backed Securities, a lot of which was rated AAA. In the 1980s, there were limits on how much the World Bank could borrow in Switzerland and Germany, but none on how much it could borrow in the United States. So it borrowed in the United States (at an astronomical interest rate – it was the era of Paul Volcker, remember) and promptly swapped out the loan with IBM, creating the concept of the interest rate swap in that period.

In fact, apart form the ATM (which Volcker famously termed as the last financial innovation that was useful to mankind, or something), most financial innovations that you have seen in the last few decades would have come about as a result of some stupid regulation somewhere.

Reading articles such as this one (the one by Levine quoted above) wants me to get back to finance. To get back to finance and work for one of the big boys there. And to be able to design these brilliantly devious trades that smack stupid regulations in the arse! Or maybe I should find myself a job as some kind of a “codebreaker” in a regulatory organisation where I try and find opportunities for arbitrage in any potentially stupid rules that they design (disclosure: I just finished reading Cryptonomicon).

Looking back, while my three years in finance taught me much, and have put me on course for my current career, I think I didn’t do the kind of finance that would give me the most kick. Maybe I’m not too old and I should give it another shot? I won’t rule that one out!

PS: back when I worked for the Giant Squid, a bond trader from Bombay had come down to give a talk. I asked him a question about regulatory arbitrage. He didn’t seem to know what that meant. At that point in time I lost all respect for him.