What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)
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Re: What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)
#2The same thing happened to me. I had lost 2M in bad deals. "The illusion of control, overestimate your risk" and failure to understand "probability", the tail risk was responsible for my ruin.
Re: What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)
#3The same thing happened to me. I had lost 2M in bad deals. "The illusion of control, overestimate your risk" and failure to understand "probability", the tail risk was responsible for my ruin.
I'm sorry for your loss. It must hurt pretty bad.
Would you say lack of transparency around what the markets are doing has been a contributing factor not being able to assess risk appropriately?
Re: What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)
#4The same thing happened to me. I had lost 2M in bad deals. "The illusion of control, overestimate your risk" and failure to understand "probability", the tail risk was responsible for my ruin.
I'm sorry for your loss. It must hurt pretty bad. Would you say lack of transparency around what the markets are doing has been a contributing factor not being able to assess risk appropriately?
It's speculation. It can always go badly, no matter how much transparency there is.
Re: What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)
#5I can relate to this. Getting liquidated early on in my career taught me a lot about risk management and a lot about myself. I kept throwing good money after bad, sure that I was correct and that it was only a matter of time. It wasn't... and I wasn't as smart or clever as I thought I was.
Nowadays I put much less confidence in any one position. Leaving room for being wrong is the most important thing.
Re: What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)
#6I crewed on a sailboat in YRA races leading up to and during the 2008-9 crash. It was mostly people from Lehman and Barclays. I was the only SV guy on the boat.
No one partied harder than those guys but then they really only partied with themselves. It was kinda like Boiler Room. The Dot Com boom is the stuff of legends but these guys left nothing on the table.
Barclays had a riff and ordered a string of cabs to take people home. One of them stepped into the cab and said Vegas.
For all that they were wrong about everything. Highly paid, quite sure of themselves but wrong. Basically they were poker players (and they played a lot of poker) but they weren’t very good. It was just other people’s money so who cared.
They didn’t learn anything.
Re: What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)
#7I crewed on a sailboat in YRA races leading up to and during the 2008-9 crash. It was mostly people from Lehman and Barclays. I was the only SV guy on the boat. No one partied harder than those guys but then they really only partied with themselves. It was kinda like Boiler Room. The Dot Com boom is the stuff of legends but these guys left nothing on the table. Barclays had a riff and ordered a string of cabs to take…
> It was mostly people from Lehman and Barclays. I was the only SV guy on the boat
And now its mostly SV guys on the boat and the occasional trader? :)
"Highly paid, quite sure of themselves but wrong... It was just other people’s money so who cared."
Re: What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)
#8I crewed on a sailboat in YRA races leading up to and during the 2008-9 crash. It was mostly people from Lehman and Barclays. I was the only SV guy on the boat. No one partied harder than those guys but then they really only partied with themselves. It was kinda like Boiler Room. The Dot Com boom is the stuff of legends but these guys left nothing on the table. Barclays had a riff and ordered a string of cabs to take…
Please, where can we read more stories about this? I'd love to hear! :)
Re: What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)
#9I crewed on a sailboat in YRA races leading up to and during the 2008-9 crash. It was mostly people from Lehman and Barclays. I was the only SV guy on the boat. No one partied harder than those guys but then they really only partied with themselves. It was kinda like Boiler Room. The Dot Com boom is the stuff of legends but these guys left nothing on the table. Barclays had a riff and ordered a string of cabs to take…
Please, where can we read more stories about this? I'd love to hear! :)
Read Liar’s Poker and basically everything by Lewis.
Re: What I Learned from Losing $200M (2015)
#10As a junior trader navigating the markets during that time I noticed that nobody has a clue about anything. Pundits, researchers, analysts, Junior guys, Senior guys... They all pretend to know. I'm not suggesting the markets are truly random. Systematic profits are feasible year over year... But only to the select few who are in the right product or looking at the market in the right way. I suppose it's those guys that keep attracting fresh blood to a zero sum game where there are mostly losers.