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A true American way is to shoot him. Solves this kinda of problems permanently.

Assuming 3 percent risk-less yields, PV of that $70k(ish) pension for a 55-year old who is retiring today and is going to live to the ripe age of 85 is some 1.5 million dollars. With inflation adjustment about 2 million. Not rich, but definitely not poor in my book...

(a) The general wisdom is that a calendar, if done root-time vega flat, is a short risk product. Meaning that if vol picks up, you are most probably going to lose money. (b) A corollary to that is that most money is made on the on the lack of realization in the front and the forward...

Yeah, and Buddha likes to run large portfolios, to be the one with everything...

I am more worried that they get their colour from the Higher Source... THE ULTIMATE INSIDE TRADING :O

A buddy just pinged me that Istituto per le Opere di Religione just came in to bid for 50-strike Aug VIX calls. Should we be worried, maybe there have some non-public material information?

It's important to understand whose lunch you are eating. Could you explain to yourself why these puts are overpriced? There are very few free lunches, there are only cheap lunches - but even with a cheap lunch, that potato you are biting in might actually be a rock

I used to interact with these people daily as a "client". There are some pretty smart guys out there, but on average they end up doing tactical quickies and very quickly get pulled in to work closely with the desk or end up being integrated into the quant group. The project guys usually do suck...

Oh, no, they get equity all the time, except it's the kind of equity that gives you zero upside. E.g. the girl who was my desk quant (read "glorified programmer") at The Second Great Evil cleared 350k in 2011, which is not bad for someone two years out of master program. However, it was all...

Academically-speaking, the question is "do you need to predict the first moment when taking a view of the terminal distribution?". The answer is clearly "yes", as the first moment will be the most important for your returns. However, if you are expressing it via instruments that are leveraged on...

Now that you actually have to say something of substance to prove your worth, you don't have time for it. We all get it, it's classic. Go away, please, and take your penis envy some place else. PS. I have not been to such a fun pissing match since grade school, yahoo!

But of course I love making assumptions, that's what this business is all about - assumptions supported by data. You don't want to explain what exactly do you trade, so I can assume the answer is nothing. Do you have a Bloomberg account, since you are a "pro" or should we assume you take...

In SPYs on average 8% of all positions that should be early ex-d are forgotten. In Sep, coincidentally, there was a big f*ck-up in ML so it' was more like 20%. However, the allocation of that windfall is random.

It's a known fact in the industry that top tier firms are good place to be a manager at or a good place to be from. In general, they pay out less of the performance - the assumption is that the value of the seat is higher. So, if one is truly able to extract money out of screens, he's...

Of course. It's ton of fun :)

Yeah, I've interviewed with the firm that was able to "win every day". They had such a neat trading floor in the Lipstick building - you could literally fabricate microchips there, it was so immaculate. Of course not. I've worked for a couple top tier firms before and they pay less. I am...

They are very different - one is a risk of a large realized move, while the other is the risk of "risk perception".

Yeah, index vol is richer then single name vol because of its macro nature. If you'd speak in insurance terms, it's a global event risk that you can not diversify away. Inability to diversify that risk away is the reason why funds and banks try to stay away from that business - for them, a year...

Actually, it's about American vs European indeed. The two options were roughly the same distance from the ATM forward, but one is American (SPY) the other is European (SPX). So, I was short an American call and long a European call on the same proportional strike - the idea is that some people...