YouSaid · the spoken record

Emanuel Derman

lines on the record: 127
first: 2016-02-26
most recent: 2016-02-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm going to write that down. It's not a big bestseller by any means, but I once wrote a bunch of columns for a German newspaper. There was an editor there. He actually died shortly after the Frankfurter Algemeiner Zeitung, who liked models behaving badly. And for about a year, I wrote a column for them every two weeks. and I took most of it, they put it into German, but I had it in English and I put most of it into this little book”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't actually have one in Columbia. I just have Emmanuel Durman.com. And I once wrote a book of columns and short stories which you can get on Amazon as an ebook that I put them myself.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It used to be one of these people that, when everything was about to collapse, I thought, oh my God, like now I'd better sell before it goes to zero. It never goes to zero, but it doesn't go to so far it doesn't go to zero. So I would say. Take a long term view and ignore the fluctuations, but it's hard to do.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe it might have still been interesting, but I sort of scorned it at the time in a snobbish sort of way. And my experience over the years with lots of things is that when you get involved in them, Hardcore and deeply, you find all sorts of interesting things that you didn't expect. And so I think that's the advice I would give people, is plunge in and if you have to do something different. And when you get deep inside, you find a whole world opening up.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learn to program, don't ignore, I don't know, it's going to say one thing I kind of learned is when I left physics, when I left particle physics, I was sort of a little bit disgusted with myself that I thought I was going to be a physicist and I wasn't going to be one. And there were jobs in applied physics as opposed to pure research like in energy or heat or heat stuff. And I didn't want to do that. I thought if I'm going to get out of physics, I'm going to go sort of all the way. And it worked for me. But at the same time, I realized over the years that almost everything is interesting and that maybe I was wrong. I could have gotten just as interested in doing... Something else. So I think more applied.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Safe certain companies. That's interesting. Probably a large part I was trying to think, so I was saying be willing to do your own dirty work, get your hands dirty.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now it's changed a little bit. I'm getting off topic. It's changed a little bit because Americans are suddenly discovering that you can get rich by being a good programmer like Mark Zuckerberg or somebody like that. And so it's changed a little bit. But for a long time, it seemed to me Americans wanted to be managers, so why go do financial engineering, whereas foreigners sort of had no choice.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And after 20 years, it's kind of nice to have a difference. I would say get good at programming. At least that's my experience in almost anything. If you can do your own, yeah, I like to tell people to be willing to get your hands dirty and do your own dirty work. Don't just be a manager maybe one day. That's the thing I was going to say earlier. It somehow seems to me a lot of, maybe not now after the internet craze, but in the 90s, most Americans, and when I worked at most Americans wanted to be managers and most foreigners wanted to... Work with their hands or their heads, so to”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somewhat cynical stuff. I don't know. I would say, first of all, I started out thinking I was going to have one career. And you're the same from what you were telling me. Then you discover that you're going to change and life is different nowadays. Yeah, me too. So I've kind of had three in a sense. I started in physics, then I went to Bell Labs for a while and then I ended up in finance. So I would say expect to have more than one career.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some in China, some in money management, some in risk management, a few in trading, some in non-purely financial firms. Now there's a big trend towards machine learning and big data.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expats and things like that. Expats and people or Australians who come there, whereas our classes are pretty much nothing wrong with it, but that just shows you where it's going.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your student says Chinese. That's an amazing in this master's program of like 100 students, I would say I'm guessing a little bit. I would say 40% comes straight from mainland China. Another 40% come from America or Europe, but they're Chinese citizens and went there undergrad. In fact, this is sort of a little funny, but my son who lives in Hong Kong, he teaches history at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. And when I've been there, I've sat in on his class, and his classroom looks more cosmopolitan than mine.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How does that work? Yeah, I think that's what kind of happens. Immigrants come in and do the stuff that's hard, not so much hard in a difficult sense, but hard in that very concrete, that you know what success is and you know what being good at it means. And then their kids want to be businessmen.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I worked at Goldman, I ran this Kant group, you know, the majority were foreign, not necessarily Chinese, but the majority were. I don't know America.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is for tuition. And so, yeah, they're millions of. It's good. There are millions of Chinese students in this country, some stay, some go back. But really, the graduate schools in the sciences and certainly in the financial engineering programs, but I think in physics in general, all run on foreign students in Chinese. Why is that?”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out of the country. A mix, a mix. But a lot of them, you know, it's an expensive program. People pay, I don't know, $60 or $80,000 a year to study plus living costs. Chinese have money, they can get money out of the country until now”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would guess that I'm not really good at predicting the future about the stuff, but I think as China's going to have to democratize, now you see a lot of people trying to get money out of the country. They're going to have to put in capital controls. It'll be interesting to see what happens. Certainly in the program I teach, it's sort of astonishing. 80% of the students are basically from mainland China.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, really? I mean, I think mom and pop investors are doomed in the long run, and in China too, China's still manipulating their markets a lot as far as I can tell”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll try to think a little bit about this as you're talking. Just extensions of what's happening. I think the vanishing of small investors, which has been happening, maybe not so much in Japan, but has certainly happened here and I think is now starting to happen in Japan.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's incentive to not do. Did you see somebody got into trouble, some bank a few months ago for giving clients? The worst price currency price of the day consistently, yeah, consistently giving them the low if they were selling in the high, if they were buying.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but currencies are, and I think it'll go that way. I think partly because in a cynical sort of way, there's a lot of money to be made by, I think part of the people who trade currencies, my guess would be that they're reluctant to go electronic because there's a lot of, you look at what Chase charging you 3% for every time you use your credit card in a foreign country. There's very big, very big margins over there.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because actually they should be in the sense that it's hard to do with bonds because bonds are very idiosyncratic and there aren't one stock millions of different bonds.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can still make models, but they're kind of harder to implement because I don't know how it is now. I'm a little out of date, but you had a call somebody and you can't really do statistical arbitrage easily where you have an algorithm that just sends out orders and buys when it needs to and sells when it needs to because you still have to call somebody on the telephone.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're kind of going lockstep. You know, you can now get good price data, good volatility data. I guess the bond market isn't really electronic yet, but heading in that direction. And currencies are still over the counter. But I think that's the biggest trend that people can now trade by algorithms and trade by computer. And those skills are more and more in demand.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think electronic trading and electronic markets and the effect that's had filtering down on everything. So kind of computers in a sense no more open outcry, you know, everything matched by computer. And that certainly affected the careers of people.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, there's a third one that says don't let anybody see you. Right. Look what happened to people in the Amazon or to the bush. Exactly. So just keep quiet.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really, I think I've seen a version of this that's really interesting, and I think I've only read about descriptively, but where they say you might get intelligent life, but sooner or later they destroy themselves and they're unable to communicate with the rest of the universe by reverting back to a fairly primitive state.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I almost have a slightly religious feeling about it, although I'm not really religious, but you think about this gravitational wave thing and you say, okay, it took 100 years for a thousand people to verify the prediction of one guy 100 years ago. Fact that somebody could figure out the way the universe works just by pure thought. It's sort of an intuition which he then elaborates into a model. It's just sort of it's enough to make you a believer almost.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't read much physics anymore. I have to admit I've sort of, I like to keep up in a popular way, but I don't read any handful of.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I studied the final lectures and I actually shook his hand once in a men's room at a Geno conference in Aachen. Not shook his hand, I spoke to him in 19”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. There's a collection that I have called essays and aphorisms. It's a thin penguin book with a lot of essays about everything from getting old to wisdom to how you should not read until you've exhausted thinking. And I'm very good and very, very beautifully written. A little bit like Freud. Like he could get a Nobel Prize just for his writing style.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nonfiction, yeah, I like history, although I kind of like, I have a hard time suddenly thinking of things, but I sort of like Goethe, I read a lot of modern, I read mostly a lot of modern fiction. But nonfiction, I like some philosophy, I like Schopenhauer, I like Schopenhauer the most because he's kind of cynical in a very readable sort of way.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fiction, I like sort of good romantic books, so I like Anna Karenina and I like Madame Bovary. Okay. Those are two of my favorite. And Lolida, I have to say. So all have a similar theme. obsessively in love. It's always a good story.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm inclined to agree with you. I have friends who went into money management after they left Goldman into their own money management firms. And occasionally one of them says to me, wow, this has been a really hard time to be a money manager for the last 15 years. Then I think, well, kind of what are you getting paid for? Right. But how do you, it's hard to do better than other people. And he sort of imagines maybe that the world should keep.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I kind of like that a few times I used to do that. I remember noticing with my kids years ago that all of my kids' friends' mothers were wearing Reebok shoes before I'd ever heard of Reebok when they were all doing aerobics. And they were all drinking clearly Canadian at some point. These are like 25 years ago. Sure. And I remember going into Lululemon a few years ago and being amazed by the good running gear they had. and seeing people drink a what do you call it curry green mountain so i still like the idea that you that you spot something that you like or i was like that about apple actually where you just love the product and you say I'm going to go with it without reading about eBit or Ebit DA or anything like that.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm kind of like that. I like it intellectually, but I don't like following the markets. But I have a Times bought options years ago when I was allowed to, but I don't really do that anymore.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. To be honest, I don't invest that much. I'm a ETF mutual fund guy in the old days, EDF now For a long time, when I worked at Goldman and I recently worked at a funder funds, I wasn't allowed to buy individual stocks.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In finance, I would say fish are black the most in that I got there and there was still not a lot of quants at Goldman and I got involved immediately in working for the bond options trading desk and they connected me with Fisher because he was the expert. And he really had a very big impact on me. So I would say he set out to mentor me. He was kind of a bit of a A cold fish in a nice way. But I really learned a lot from him, both about perseverance and about not taking models too seriously.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, in physics or in, well. Yeah, in physics there were a couple of professors in South Africa that I worked for. There was a guy called Professor Whiteman who sort of tutored me. He's long dead probably.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was at Solomon for one year or a little bit more and then in mortgages and then I went back to Goldman. I started fixed income. I went to Solomon in mortgages and then I came back and I was in equity derude for like 10 years which was really my favorite”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was 1980 when I went there, and I started working on actually much more computer programming. I learned to be a good programmer at the time. We were tackling sort of problems that ATT had where you could use computer modeling and financial modeling. I didn't like it very much. I learned a lot of useful stuff, but I always really hankered to go back to a more academic job, but that was too difficult. And then all the headhunters started knocking on the doors of people because interest rates were high and Solomon and Goldman and these places were hiring people. And it took me a few years to adjust the idea, but I decided I would take a leap out of. Of the whole sphere and into the business world. It was sort of a shock for me. I never expected to ever do that”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There for a good couple of years. Yeah, I was there for five years. So then I stopped doing physics and I worked in a business analysis center that sort of was supplying physics techniques or mostly programming to AT&T business problems”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was 1980 where people went then, there was the oil crisis and telecom was building up and you're either people who were physicists either went to work for Exxon or mobile or they went to Bell Labs and I took a job at Bell Labs later.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“kind of not planned. I got a PhD in 1973 from Columbia. And then, as I said, jobs were hard to find. And I had a postdoc at University of Pennsylvania. And then I had a job at Oxford in England. And then I had a job at Rockefeller University in New York, and my wife was in biology, and we were moving all over the world out of sync with each other, actually. Right. And then when we were in England together, we had a kid, and then we both had jobs in New York. And then it was very hard to get permanent jobs. I got a job in Boulder. She couldn't get a job there. I lived there for a while. And eventually I sort of threw in the towel. It was getting too complicated. And then...”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got a graphic of it. You do. Yeah, it's on my website, and I was once going to make a poster out of it because it's really, in fact, I once submitted somebody. Somebody at the serpentine gallery in London had a map competition that somebody connected me to and I submitted that as a map and it's in a book somewhere”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cruelty is what you call the desire of somebody else to inflict pain on someone that you love. So, cruelty eventually goes down to pleasure, pain, and desire. And I like to say it's like a. It's like a convertible bond that has both equity exposure, credit exposure, and fixed income exposure. It goes down to all three of the derivatives. So he's really got to actually drew a chart, which is a great giant.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Went to behave that way. And it's actually, so A, it's very interesting. And B, it's really closely related to derivatives. It's sort of astonishing because what he does is he says at the bottom of the chain, there are only three things which is pleasure, pain, and desire. And everybody knows what pleasure, pain, and desire are, but he actually defines it in some philosophical way. And then he defines every other emotion, and there are hundreds of them verbally in terms of how they reduce to pleasure, pain, and desire. So, for example, love is expectation of pleasure from some other person and pain is hatred is the opposite, expectation of pain. That's a little bit corny, but then, for example, he says, um...”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Spinoza was like 300 years ahead of his time. I tried to read the ethics once when I was writing my book because I was trying to find an example of something that I thought was a theory rather than a model. And what Spinoza did in the ethics, although it was only published posthumously, was try to figure out actually a lot like behavioral economists. You can understand the passions or the emotions, as he calls them, then he'll be able to understand why people are unhappy and then be able to figure out how they should live their lives. And so what he starts out doing is analyzing all the emotions, or as he calls them with the passions that they are. And he calls them passions because they affect you as a passive person rather than an active person. They sweep over you rather than you deciding you would want to”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with you totally. I mean, I understand why people do this stuff, but I'm a bit of a skeptic about it myself. I think just what you said, there's a standard phrase which you were sort of paralleling saying correlation is not causation. I think that's true, but people are so keen to make money for legitimate reasons that that's the easiest thing to do, and sometimes it works.”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“looking for relations between time series between fed behavior between interest rates between the behavior of factors and particular stocks so less caring about why it's happening than detecting a pattern”
2016-02-26 · Masters in Business · Interview With Emanuel Derman: Masters in Business (Audio) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source