Morgan Stanley Traders Lost $390 Million in One Day in August
- Thread starter ASusilovic
- Start date
I believe it. I've conducted some truely unbelieveable interviews. Those guys either lied on their resume or.... well.... they looked good on paper and somehow did a decent job on the phone screens.
The funny thing is, if he simply gave the wrong answer as if he has never heard of the problem before, it's probably not the end of it. It doesn't help. But in itself it's not a deal killer. But the arrogant and incredibly ignorant comment on the market did the job. If batman is still reading this: know that it's not that the trader couldn't come up with a reply to your silly challenge. He has simply realized that you two have nothing in common and is thinking of how to get out of the interview with least amount of resistance.
Lol, well put. Yes, I totally agree with all points. Its not that someone gets a question wrong, I also could not get some of the puzzles right in my previous interviews that got me the job. But when you are told you are wrong then its better to shift a gear back and listen or verify it back home. However, this guy has the guts to not even check it out at home (there are at the very least 1000 references on the net to this problem), and comes here and still tries to pronounce all those who understand the problem and solve it correctly as being stupid. Well and if all does not work anymore then statistics is flawed. The only answer I have to this is DONT TRADE. Dont risk your funds based on stupidity. Its fine to be bold but its not acceptable in a corporate environment to be outright stupid and its not recommendable to trade your own funds based on such flawed convictions.
Uhm, Donald Trump's casino went Bankrupt.
Quote from youngtrader:
That doesnt make any since with the cups. Why would you switch cups? Wouldn't that just be second guessing yourself? If you picked that cup in the first place and then you have the opportunity to switch how can you determine that you have better odds picking the other cup? Its a 50-50! That is probably the most retarded thing I have ever heard lol! Now im gonna be honest im a C student in math and absolutely hate it and find no use in calculus or algebra. Remember trading is a social science at best not a pure science like math, physics and such. So it will never be mastered by those nerds!
Look it's simple. When there are 3 cups, it's a 1/3 chance you are right and 2/3 that you are wrong. Once one cup is removed, it's now 50/50 but only so if you actually make the switch. Otherwise, you are really sticking to your old choice which is STILL 1/3 correct, 2/3 incorrect.
It makes more sense if you increase the numbers, like start with 10, pick one, then the host removes 5 wrong ones and asks you if you want to stick with your original choice.
It's a good question to ask and is somewhat applicable to trading. Often variables involved in decision making are affected in a similiar fashion, especially if you lean toward arbitrage, relative value & mean reversion strategies. It tests your ability to understand guesswork in trading, recognizing potentially wrong choice with new information, then making a better decision. Because each trade is essentially a guess based on the information you use at the time. Especially when it comes to the Quants, it's just repeated guesswork over and over based on a model.
Problem with quants is the lack of knowledge and experience of the key driving factors, greed & fear. That's no Monty Hall concept, it's psychology. For example, (and I think arrogance was a key flaw in this), when these quant progs started failing in August, someone at MS should have said "Gee, the rest of the big boys are running the same Quant crap and if we are puking, they must be too, so why not capitalize on that?" But I don't think those type of guys work there anymore.