Question for Dcifr

[DespotInExile]

You post quite a bit from a technical and macro perspective, and it's clear you work somewhere on the buy side. I find some of your comments helpful, but some I fund incomprehensible. Just so I can benchmark your comments, can you give some background about your depth of experience, and track record running money? Are you a PM, an analyst, head trader, or what? What's the general strategy of your fund? How big approximately? What's the P/L associated to your name this year? Thanks.

[DcifrThs]

[ QUOTE ]
You post quite a bit from a technical and macro perspective, and it's clear you work somewhere on the buy side. I find some of your comments helpful, but some I fund incomprehensible. Just so I can benchmark your comments, can you give some background about your depth of experience, and track record running money? Are you a PM, an analyst, head trader, or what? What's the general strategy of your fund? How big approximately? What's the P/L associated to your name this year? Thanks.

[/ QUOTE ]

to start, that last question is fairly useless. goldman sachs flagship fund lost a lot in 2006. you can lose a lot of money in a short period of time and still be very profitable in expectation.

in terms of my background i'm a former economist for the dept. of labor but that position was mostly statistical in nature (i.e. no actual macro model building. i wrote health care and pension papers)

i got my MBA in mathematical finance from wash u. so that gave me some theoretical background in understanding the math behind asset pricing "in continuous time."

from there, and until recently, i worked as an analyst for a top 3 hedge fund with about $30bil in the flagship product and over $165bil under management.

more impressive than the fund's actual results is their training process, which i completed, and how they approach problems in managing money and managing business. though, to be clear, the fund's results are very impressive, even while managing a large amt of capital. the historical information ratio (excess return/st.dev) has been just over 1.0. their target is and has been a 1.0 information ratio.

the "general strategy" is fundamental analysis combined with flows & intermarket action whose logic is written down for a computer to process daily. writting your logic down forces you to backtest it thoroughly and gives you time to check what you're missing. you then write that logic down in an algorithm and let the computer do what it does best, compute.

they do this for every singel position taken. and they take a freaking massive amt of positions in the most liquid markets in the world.

thats as much as i'll say about the fund itself.

as for me, my personal trading history has been through the trading game at the fund. in this game, i was allowed to take almost any position the fund takes and my wins/losses were added to/subtracted from my annual bonus. i ended up doing well in the game, but more important than my results was how i went about thiking about constructing a portfolio of active bets, managing that (VERY small relatively speaking) portfolio on a daily basis and most importantly, knowing with a fair degree of certainty, how much money i could make/lose on a daily/weekly/monthly/annual basis. i built that portfolio bet by bet and with everything i read i try to think about what that means for the funds trading it. what does the market think? could the market be right? if so, what would be required for that to be true? if the market is wrong, what would i look for to test that? etc. etc.

the knowing your $exposure part is hard to get at and requires logical and thoughtful assumptions about the correlations of your bets, their historic volatility and their possible future volatility. you know you can never be right since volaitlities and correlations move around over time and over a short period of time they could spike & move to one, respectively, if a black swan event type happens, however the base behind the #s is understanding the logical relationship between and among your bets.

i hope that helps put some of my stuff & track record in perspective.

to be clear, i don't have a multiple year history managing tons of money. i do have short but intense training at a top hedge fund & an MBA in mathematical finance (which turns out to be pretty useless). i also read financial stuff voraciously (though i suck at spelling).

i'm terribly sorry that some of my writing is incomprehensible. if you post examples of that, i'll try to break it down very clearly.

hope this helps,
Barron

EDIT: now my turn... please to be answering your question yourself [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] ... (or at least the what do you do etc. etc.) thanks

[DespotInExile]

Thanks. It sounds like DE Shaw, but I'm guessing, of course. What are you up to now?

I've had two careers. Im currently an attorney with principally an SEC/criminal practice; in a previous career, I worked at a top managment consultancy, with an emphasis on operations improvement.

My personal investment experience tends to be less direct investment, and more asset allocation oriented.

[Nomad84]

Deleted by request -evan

[DcifrThs]

[ QUOTE ]
Thanks. It sounds like DE Shaw, but I'm guessing, of course. What are you up to now?

I've had two careers. Im currently an attorney with principally an SEC/criminal practice; in a previous career, I worked at a top managment consultancy, with an emphasis on operations improvement.

My personal investment experience tends to be less direct investment, and more asset allocation oriented.

[/ QUOTE ]

gotcha.

well i guess most of my posts are kinda geared towards those with a base strong finance background so they might be a little convoluted.

if you post some things that i've said that were "incomprehinsible" i'd try to break it down simply.

also, obviously i shouldn't have posted as much info as i did since i didn't want to bring my former employer's identity out. but i hope nobody trainwrecks the good people over there back to me. i can only hope my service to this kind forum proves worthy of not harrassing the people there.

thanks nomar [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img] (but it's my fault too)

anyways, it was a great place to work and trained me well. now it's onward and upward [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Barron

[Nomad84]

Sorry about that Barron. If you can tell me how to delete my post, I will. I thought it was easy, but I'm not seeing the option anywhere.

[edit]I guess maybe you can only delete posts for a short time after they are made? In any case, I have PMed the mods to request that they delete my previous post. Sorry again Barron. I should have taken it as a strong hint that you didn't want your employer identified when you didn't directly identify them yourself.[/edit]