Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

academicearth.org

Reddit has a lot of such things.

In particular, aren't you also signalling that you're a fraidy-cat conformist who can't do things for him/herself?

What if you don't have enough money to go to Vegas at all?

Bah! The market is perfectly easy to exploit these days, you just need to make your bets with other people's money.

Of course, to make that work, you've got to convince people with lots of money that you'll beat the market, else they'll never hand over the cash. These people don't care for your high-falootin math, so you should probably leave out the real gory details when you talk to them, but you can't make it too obvious that you're babying them, you need them to feel like they could totally understand all of it if only they weren't too busy to listen; further, if you know anything about your math, you know that the market's not very easy to beat, and that if they knew how tough it was, they'd never give you their money.

In other words, it's bullshit time: you're gonna have to lie through your teeth if you want that money.

Having lost lots of money for other people in the past is the best way to look credible, though in some cases it's okay if you've come out ahead, too. Be careful though, if you've done too well they might start to wonder how much of your own wad you're putting into this thing, and you never want to play with your own money, so it's always better if you don't have to answer the question at all. Never mind that you took your 1% per year off the top of all the money you lost before you lost it (and really don't mention the 10% of each up year!), at least as far as your future investors know, you don't have any Real Money to speak of. :)

People with lots of money and an interest in mathy funds are often familiar with the two base trading strategy types (well, the two base types other than that boring old "buy good companies and hold them like a puss" strategy), momentum and mean reversion - "mean reversion" in particular makes these guys feel really smart when you say it and they understand what you mean, as does "volatility", so say those words a lot, it will help.

As you construct your pitch, you have to make sure to take into account the recent MFE grad, physics major, or computer geek that your mark...err, "future investor"...will hire as a consultant to look into it and see if he can automate the strategy on the cheap based on the details you've given him. The reaction you want from that consultant is less "this is a really good strategy, I should try to do it!" or "this is idiotic, I'm going to expose this" and more "this looks like a joke, but it's strung together plausibly enough that this rich moron's probably going to give these guys a lot of money, I wonder, can I get a job there in exchange for my silence?".

Taking all that into account, here's the type of elevator pitch you want to shoot for:

"Alpha will be created by constructing synthetic Asian lookback options on emerging market debt with valuations derived from our proprietary distributed high frequency mean reversion algorithm that predicts, with 98% accuracy, volatility skews at the millisecond time scale and below."[1]

Blammo.

[1] Your actual trading strategy, of course, will be "Put as much money on the line as possible without getting sent to jail. Cross fingers, pray for profit after a year. Collect huge pile of money if so, change name of fund and create new, better fund with bigger investors next year if not. Repeat."

I still remember the moment in statistical physics class when my prof wrote down the Black-Scholes model, explained how people made a lot of money using it, added that the inventors had received a Nobel prize and proceeded to show that it was just the diffusion equation.

The diffusion equation. It was so underwhelming that I lost any interest in going into financial engineering.