YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Gurevich

lines on the record: 95
first: 2022-05-06
most recent: 2022-05-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'm trying to position for mispriced results, and usually that means that I could take some losses if I'm wrong. I do like to have trades that go in every possible direction, like something that will make money if the other thing happens, right? But it's not always possible to have portfolio balanced. The dichotomy that one faces in such situations, when you're pretty sure which way the way we will go is that, well, on one hand, you have really good odds in your favor, on the other hand, the risk symmetry is very bad. So if you make a bet, for example, just very specific bat on the FOMC outcome that they're going to go 25 basis points, I might make such a bet, but it would be very moderate in size so that if they do go 50, which would be an outlier, I cannot afford to blow up. It has to be a moderate manageable loss if that happens.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And tell us what happened in 94 Yeah, that caused the bond market collapse, and I think they kind of just learned a lesson why it's very hard for me to imagine why would they bother. So the event is to happen in four minutes, and I could be proven wrong. But the market is pricing maybe like 10% of chance of them doing 50 basis points.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of disruption, it will all be on them while they have plenty of time to do what the market expects them to do and then signal for the next meeting what they actually want to do at the next meeting. Because of this mentality, there have not been any intermitting hikes or surprisingly hikes on size since I believe 1994.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so we're very close to the fad in my address. Problems that were happening, and usually no matter how much expected, they tended to surprise by doing even more aggressive rate cut measures when crisis is like in 2001 or 2008 or 2020 would occur. I think they have very little upside of hiking when market doesn't expect them to hike because tightening interest rates has a very slow effect. Whether they're going to raise rates 25 basis points today or extra 25 basis points. I mean, today or at the next meeting, they have plenty of, that's not going to have any major effect on financial markets. Sorry, it's going to have effect. I apologize. They're going to have effect on financial markets, but they're not going to have long-term economic effects that actual tightening. So it seems like a very bad risk reward proposition for them if they hike more than expected and cause a stock market crash or something.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The trade was just undeniable, and I had to say, okay, I gave up some of my previous gains on options because the wall collapsed so much, but that is not what I should be thinking about. What I should be thinking about is not what I made and what I lost, but here's where we stand now. This is the market price and this is the portfolio. I've done this before, sometimes with success, sometimes I was wrong, of course. I can have some partition going against me, but I say now the levels are really good and I'm going to dramatically increase the position.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the interest rates should be in 2020, there was no most likely price. Safety of price to close to 3%, the 3% was not a tiny teeniest bit more likely than 1% or 4% or 2% or 0. So the forward that we had in interest rates had absolutely no prerogative in terms of the actual outcome, except that it was the forward. That was the market price. But in terms of where the price will end up gave us absolutely no signal about that because we could be easing more, we could be easing, which I thought would happen, or we could be tightening. And that originated my option traits for contracts of 2020. And what happened in 2019, that the vol just on those option trades came down so much that”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, why did you feel I discuss in my book what on occasion options On occasion, options are so severely mispriced that there is no choice to use them. And usually it has not to do with actually directly like what is the implied volatility of the money option is, but sometimes option structure is totally wrong because the typical option pricing is always built on some kind of normal distribution, that there is a central scenario which is most likely and other scenarios that get as likely as you move away from the central scenario. And yes, people have all these like fat tails, skew, kartosis. I don't even know all of those terms. I used to know them better 20 years ago or so. But there are all those things to adjust, to not use classic normal distribution, but it's still, the idea is that there is certain central most likely price. Occasionally that is not the case at all. And that's what I was recognizing in 2018. There was no, like if you looked at”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The timing you need, and you will end up having the correct view in a losing trade. And don't even get me started on complex options. I absolutely hate all those knock-in, knockouts, barriers. I think that is just 90% of the time it's just setting cash on fire to do complex options. There could be some exceptions.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mentioned, I've talked earlier that I used to be an options market maker. And I think that gave me like a lot of, I know this is actually a pattern. Hedge fund managers who are options market makers in the past tend to use options much less when they go to the buy side. The reason is that you kind of know the fallacies, all the fallacies associated with using options. Every option looks, if you buy an option, it always looks great if your underlying market assumption is correct. If you think the market goes up 30% and you buy a call, of course the call will look great. But that kind of idea of value in a call based on your original speculation that market is going to go up 30% is fallacious. And when you own options, there is a lot of ways for them to go wrong. You could be right about the direction, but it just can move not fast enough or not far enough or not.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sometimes my portfolio will not have any positions related to stock market at all. And sometimes it will be heavily positioned. It could be not exactly stock market. It could be something like dividend futures. It could be any kind of stock indices around the world. For me, that is just a component. And I don't spend a lot of time speculating on a short-term direction of it.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one of the things is I've always thought that stock market is what it is. It's a fraction of financial markets that's very important one because stock market is a really good indicator of what's going on in the world and it tends to be really good leading indicator of certain things. But trying to figure out on a given day what the stocks are going to go up and down, yes, I spent very little time on such discussions. It's extremely rare for me to talk about whether stock market is going to go up or down today or tomorrow. I have no idea and I kind of know I'm thinking those terms. I find that stock market is an important component of the portfolio. And I mentioned earlier on that I had been involved in risk parity type of trading early in my career. And I look, but for me stock market is not special. It's not like the main investable asset. It's just one of the assets.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, if you're in an operating room and you are performing a surgery, they cut the person, they put those little, like, I don't know what it's called, pieces of gas on site.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there is a lot of stuff going on in the background in terms of operations, but I did think it was important to, particularly important to show Slack chat in all its entirety without cutting this boring, almost like boring confirmations and operational discussions, just to see what the process is like. I always get laughing like when they do in TV shows and somebody picks up the phone and says, why are $5 million to such and such and click off? You know what happens on the real world? They'll call you back. They will confirm. They will ask you why the wire is for. They will make sure, ask for your birthday, even if they talk to you 100 times before. There is a lot of due diligence goes into any kind of financial transactions, which I think a lot of media portrayals over the world skips. And again, this is...”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is actually a training slecture. It's only a fraction of what is happening because it does not show any of the operational talk, right? It doesn't take any of the strategy research talk and it doesn't actually have operation talk. That is, all the trades are getting checked and booked and there's tons of work done by our middle office people, right? by our operations people.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or they can actually go into the operating room Seeing the actual trade chatter, for anyone who actually wants to be in financial markets and wondering what it's like, they can actually go and see what is happening in a hedge fund when there is a crisis. It's similar. Imagine, would you be interested in being like an oval office of the White House when there is some kind of military crisis developing, like Caribbean crisis, a current crisis, right? Similarly, I don't know, maybe like you'd want to be like at the CDC headquarters when pandemic was unfolding, right? It's interesting to take a peek at those places. And I felt my slack chances my Slack records allow people to see it in a very faithful way, which I cannot paint. I cannot paint myself. Like here I was making all the right decisions. You could see all the confusion, all their commotion, all the mistakes, all the like, we did this trade today, but you know what? We have to unwind it because it's not working at all.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I realize that there is a lot of good books written about trading, and some of them are written by journalists, interviewing traders, some of them are written by money managers themselves. But any book, even, and that includes even my first book, any book that one reads shows a person's perspective, a person's recollection, their biases, their views. And that's okay. You read that if you read somebody's book, you want to read their views, right? I wanted to get the closest to writing an objective book, even though my commentary is obviously subjective, but a book that you really could not say, well, he fudged that. You could really see timestamp on everything I say. And I think the value of that is, what I think about in terms of, say, for recently I've been using this analogy a lot, if you think of aspiring traders and medical students, they could read an anatomy book, which could be my first book or some other trading book.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like certain trends would unfold so rapidly. So I'm a long-term trader. I try to be patient. A lot of times I put a trade on and it's there for two years. And in March 2020, a lot of trades had to be changed around quite a bit within days. So it felt like a time warp. And when you have this time warp distorted time, that automatically makes me think of black holes. Sure. And then I realized not just time was warp, but the whole market structure was warped. Things were just getting really disconnected. Like one thing was one thing was trading. It had nothing to do with the way the other thing was trading. And that also makes me think of time space ruptured by a black hole.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's another area which is super fun for me. I really love black holes and I love reading about them. But also I started thinking about this a lot because of the time distortion factor. One of the reasons why I thought about writing this book. The trade of March 2020 is because the month of March seemed like infinite. Every trading day was like a few months volume of trading every day. And that's when I said at the end of that month, it's like, well, we survived March, the month of March, somebody should write a book about this month. And then it's like, okay, I can write a book about this month because there's so much happening. And things that would normally take sometimes, the trades that sometimes would take years to unfold would unfold within hours.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, first of all, honestly, when people use metaphors, they just reach to whatever area is fun for them. For example, if you fan, like I hear people a lot use, for example, baseball metaphors. I know nothing about baseball. And I don't really watch team sports, but I do like medieval warfare and I read a lot of fantasy books which involve it. So that's on my mind. So I think the idea is you want to use metaphors which are fun for you, but also kind of powerful. I think going to battle is a powerful metaphor. People can relate to it. You go to battle, you need to train, you need to have a weapon to attack and a shield and armor to protect yourself. And that is a very simple. I kind of think anyone can relate to it, but honestly, for me, it's just fun to write this way.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do I really have any qualification to know what the next step in the conflict is? Absolutely not. Furthermore, I don't even have qualifications to know what the next inflation release will be. I mean, I don't know any more than thousands of other economists that analyze it. What I have qualifications for is construct trades and portfolios, but it's very easy to go into other areas which are related. Now, imagine that you are saying individual stock trader and you know that your stock is affected by interest rates or currency or even just overall direction of economy. It's very hard not to start forming views on those things. And what I think is very hard in your mind to apartmentalize between the areas you expert in and the areas you're not an expert in.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think I'm really good at many things, you try some new things and you think, well, surely I'll be good at that too. Surely I can apply this logic. For example, if I use my logic and apply my logic to analyze stocks, right, individual stocks, surely I can do that, right? My intuition, it's very easy for me to, for example, to say like, oh, this is my intuition about geopolitical developments. For example, think about this. I'm a macrotrader, right? Obviously my portfolio will be impacted a lot by current military whatever, geopolitical developments. So unavoidably I start forming views about what can happen, what's the next step in the conflict.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there are two things going on. First of all, successful people have a tendency to become ultra-crepidarian, which means like they just think that they are skilled at more things than they actually are. Like if you are, and I've fallen prey to this many times in my life too.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think definitely my first perfect trade and probably there are two great junctures for perfect trades in my career and the first one happened in 2002. And in a simple word that trade in 2002 was risk parity. And back then, I had no idea that some people were already doing risk parity. I think the word was totally independent thinking, but I didn't know, of course, the word risk parity. I didn't know what Cliff Asnas was doing, what Raidalia was doing at the time. I still don't know exactly what they were doing back then. I'm not like a historian of hedge fund world. But internally, JP Morgan in 2002, I gave a presentation. And looking back at this, it was exactly risk parity. I talked about volatility portfolio weighted by implied volatility, portfolio of S&P futures and Eurado futures.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Proven to work this way because the highest rank trade that rates make money even if everything Goes against So that is the strongest test. It's very easy to make money on a trade if the events helped you. But how does the trade perform if events don't help you is probably the most salient test? So I rank trades based on certain factors that I believe predetermine which trades are more likely to make money. None of those are certainties. It's all about probability skills. It's all about kind of trying to shift the odds from being the player in the casino to being the casino.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's kind of a hybrid. I follow the markets just kind of continuously. It's hard to say, because if you're on the financial markets for 25 years without ever really taking a true break, there is certain continuity to it. You see how things develop in the world. Of course, you can miss certain important developments, but you have a general sense what's happening to interest rates, what's happening to currencies. What is the mood of the world? And you form certain opinions. Now I have a strategic system which again delineated in my first book, but I refer to how I applied it a lot on the second book in which I rank trades. What I try to do, I try to select trades which ex ante look good. And the bond trade of 2014 was the best example of this. This was the highest ranked trade I ever had in my ranking. I have a numerical ranking system, but this was the highest ranked trade in basically all history of financial markets that I know of. And it has been”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because 2020 up to COVID. We had situations when everything that could go wrong for bonds went wrong. Like we had very robust growth, strong employment. We had US politics, fiscal bonds, fiscal politics, and growth. Everything was actually negative for bonds if you looked at it numbers, right? And at those fiscal expansions and the elections and everything, you would think everything would be negative for U.S. bonds. And yet they perform tremendously well. And I had that logic in place why there was no choice for them to call my first book The Magic Sword of Necessity. I like to say sometimes”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then there was September 11th, global financial crisis. There was European debt crisis. There was, of course, going back. There was like 1987 crash. There were all those events you can look at which happened suddenly. They all have different flavor and you will not always be partitioned right for it. So there is a little bit of an element of luck in terms of being positioned right, but there is also a little bit of an element of work if you always add a little positive towards crisis premium, like if you tend to be have assets that have some balancing in your portfolio that there are some assets that make positions that make money if things go sideways. In that particular case, I did not just have protection. I had a very strong view in 2018 that rates were heading inexorably to zero. I think this view was ex ante undisputable. I think people who thought otherwise were just plain wrong.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and that definitely contributed to success in 2020. Generally, one has to realize if you're on a macro portfolio and there is some kind of exogenous event, Not always fully positioned right for it Maybe like if you always own just optionality, there are pure option funds, but even that events could do very different things. Events don't go just one direction. For example, US election in 2016 sent markets in certain way that people did not expect at that moment, right?”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Explain that. One of the things I try to concentrate on the book is show the psychology of trading. There were moments and I point them out on the book when I felt like deep existential dread. Like, what's going to happen? I feel like those moments when like, oh yeah, the Fed just cut 100 basis points, but I'm not sure that I'll do it. And you're feeling like, will everybody cut my funding tomorrow, right? Will there be no balance sheet? What's going to happen? think in those terms You realize that the markets are still ruled by fear. When you start thinking, okay, I've reduced my positions now. The Fed is buying those assets that I'm holding and they're rallying. You start feeling the sense of necessity.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fewer and not only because of the choices but because of the decisions are forced what happens is if you are a fund and you're losing money and your AUM decreases you need to reduce your position this is not about fear this is about necessity So you have to liquidate some various people need to liquidate certain positions, do certain transactions because exchanges are forcing them, the margins are forcing them, bosses are forcing them. And then the policymakers step in and they buy assets or provide liquidity. And this liquidity comes in not because somebody chooses it, but because this is various unstoppable flows that are happening in the markets. And this is a necessity. In the end, there is no choice for things but to go certain ways. Does that make sense?”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, crisis. First of all, crisis always has to be something unexpected. Crisis never happens on schedule, we know that, right? Like when people try to schedule crisis like Y2K, you get no crisis. It always comes from unexpected direction by definition. And then it usually, when there is a crisis which spills into financial markets, people lose liquidity. And then the panic starts. We need to liquidate positions how bad things can go. And things get to the point when people are really thinking that the world is ending as we know it. And one day it might end as we know it, but in global financial crisis, people thought, okay, whole financial system will collapse in COVID. I don't know what people were thinking. We're all going to die or whatever. Everything is going to be shut down. I don't know what people are thinking, but clearly people were quite panicked about what things can happen. And now, of course, we have other existential threats with the current war situation as we're recording this. First, it starts with fear, but then what happens is that, and some people act on fear, but then people have, eventually people have to act not because of the...”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where is such and such trading? And I was like, what are you talking about? It's not trading. The market is frozen. There is maybe one bid, and if I show any offer, my boss will fire me. That's my market.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think it was very important steppstone in my career that I started as a market maker. Some people who moved directly into hedge fund by side business, I think missed out a little bit. Seeing what actually happened in the trenches, what's happening on the trading floor of the bank, how the client flows work, what's doable and not doable. I think it was very important for my formation as a trader. I remember the crisis of 1998. And when there was a first freeze of the market that I observed, I was very junior, but as it turned out, I had to make some decisions because my boss was on vacation and I had to take over some aspects of the book that I was focusing on and deal with big hedge funds. I was like super junior trader and all these big hedge funds coming to me begging me for unwinds because they were blowing up. And people would ask me questions like salespeople would come and ask me questions.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Jonte is a Japanese strategic term. It originates from the game of Go and Hon means truth and te means move. So it's a true move, but the context on which it's used is sometimes in a game you make a move which is not the most flashy or aggressive, but what they call an honest move. Like what you really have to do, even maybe not the most impressive thing to do, but that's what gives you the best results in the long run.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I stated JP Morgantine early 2007. And then, so it's been quite a while. It's now 15 years that I've been doing various things on my own. But I not always run businesses. I had one fund which actually did not work out. And I talk about this a lot in my first book, The Next Perfect Trade, about my first fund and kind of mistakes that were made there and things like that. It was called Cloud View Capital. And then I for a few years basically was running my own money. And then I Jonte was created around 2015 and started to take outside money around 2016. Relatively recent but also relatively established”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was not really seeking publicity, and I was a little shy of publicity honestly after that. I don't think it was like a bad leak. It was a very positive article. There was nothing mean or negative in it, and there was nothing wrong about it, but I was just a little nervous about publicity after that, because nobody, I think they reached for comment, but I don't think this was like an article. JPMorgan was specifically pushing, right? But what I realized afterwards, like a years later when I started to raise money around my own hedge funds, I realized, well, actually, any publicity is kind of good. It's good to know people.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2003, and then there was a cycle. And it was on one side exciting and like, I know my parents were excited about showing this article. But on the other hand, I was like a little disturbed that there is a leak and somebody knows something about my positions that they should not.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, honestly, it is interesting at that time I did not really appreciate so much the value of publicity and I did almost no networking and almost no publicity. So I moved a proprietary desk in 2002 because after I did really well with my market making businesses in 2001 and build them up really well, they were forming global currencies and commodities group in the merged JPMorgan Chase Bank. By the way, this group ended up to be extremely successful going forward and they offered me to shift there and move a macro portfolio because even with my client portfolios I was more and more focusing on macro factors. And then that was like then I had a very successful yet 2002 and started very successfully 2003 and that's when they wrote an article. The article was really based on a leak I think. Somebody just told them what positions we had and what money we were making.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I got a synergy of Chase. And then Chase merged with JPMorgan. I ended up at JPMorgan Chase running basis swap franchise. And then I launched the agency asset swap franchise also in the year 2001, I think.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was at Bankers Trust and I started trading fixed income derivatives. It's very important to understand that most of my mathematician friends went to do some kind of quantitative work on Wall Street. I never did. I went straight into trading. That was my interest. I always said if I want to do research, I would stay in the math department, even if it pays less money, but the lifestyle would be worth it. I wanted to trade. I went to bankers' trust, which became to trade on a swap desk. And then it got bought by Deutsche Bank. And at Deutsche Bank, because of all the rest reorganizing, I was pretty junior at that time. They offered me different kind of job, which was very good in terms of trade options. It was not particularly interesting for me, but it was very educational, but I started to look for new jobs soon. And I got, in 2000, I got a job at Chase, basically doing basis swaps, which I did originally at Banker Stras at Junior.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I went straight to graduate school and my first job out of graduate school, that's when after I got my PhD, I went to Bankers Trust in'97. And that's when it was a critical point of my decision when I decided, okay, I've already accomplished what I needed accomplished in math. I proved my metal and now I really want to have a good opportunity. I have a good offer. I'm going to try Wall Street.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I did always want to go to America. There was no question in my mind since I was six years old. I considered myself American. Like it was deep in my heart that I'm... Belong only in one country in the United States. That was not a negative statement on Russia at all. It was not even about politics.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was very exciting and refreshing. They did show a bit of foreign movies in Russia. It was not that closed. I saw Star Wars on Russia too. So there was a little bit of cultural flow.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, honestly, since I was a teenager, there was kind of a double thinking in my mind. It's almost like two superimposed ideas that I wasn't really clear. My natural path was always to do theoretical math. I wanted to be a mathematician since I was four years old. But my fascination with finance industry, with strategy was already there. I remember seeing the movie Wall Street back in Russia and I was totally fascinated by it. And this whole idea of like financial strategy was so exciting to me. I think somewhere in the back of my mind, I always thought that at some point I would end up on Wall Street. But at the same time, I was making all emotions to pursue the career in theoretical math. So, I think I was a little conflicted about this until certain points.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I will confess the experience of being in graduate school and University of Chicago was so amazing that for many years, almost decades afterward, I suffered from nostalgia. Even when I was a successful Wall Street trader, I was often suffering from nostalgia for my graduate school days. So that's a quick summary. I think it's pretty amazing for me at least to be in a very small circles of like-minded people who had even though I grew up in a different country and backgrounds are different. But interestingly, mathematicians all around the world do the same math. And they play the same math games, solve the same puzzles. So there was so much in common and so much fun to have in that environment.”
2022-05-06 · Masters in Business · Alex Gurevich on Global Macro Investing Strategies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source