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His philanthropy includes sitting on the board of directors of Paul Tudor Jones’ Robin Hood Foundation and Jim Simon’s Math for America. Borish also explains why “Trading and riskmanagement are inherently unnatural.” Borish also previously served as chief strategist for Quad Group LLC.
Many risks important for our portfolios are new, hidden, or nuanced in some underappreciated way—and likely to be misunderstood and mispriced in the markets. Other risks can hide in plain sight.
In this episode, we take a deep dive into quantitative investing with Michael Robbins, author of the new book “Quantitative Asset Management: Factor Investing and Machine Learning for Institutional Investing.” 01:58 – Why Michael wrote the book 04:11 – Is it better if the math or the finance comes first?
So I took it upon myself to go off and took a course in bond math, took another course in derivatives and realized the underlying fundamental concepts were barely, I mean, it wasn’t even high school math in most cases. We just get to focus on assets and asset riskmanagement. RITHOLTZ: And if only you could do that.
She has a really fascinating background, very eclectic, a combination of math and law. You, you get a, a BS in Mathematics and a JD from Boston University Math and Law. It is something, math has always come easy to me since a child. I didn’t get an advanced degree in math. Not the usual combination. What happened?
The topics covered are personal finance math, retirement problems, introduction to mutual funds, the concept of fund & NAV, equity schemes, debt funds, investing in bonds, index funds, rolling returns, Exchange-traded funds(ETF) and basics of macroeconomics. You can enroll in the course here.
One, one is true and I’ve always said is that I wanted people to stop, ask if I could doing math. And no one asked me if I can do math anymore with a degree from Booth, particularly in econometrics and statistics. So people really ask you, you take French and can you do math. Two reasons. Absolutely.
So I, I did a math degree at Oxford, which is more pure math. You know, pure math can be very theoretical and detached from the real world, and it’s getting worse. Those have compounded over the centuries and have managed to amass a huge amount of, of capital. Riskmanagement. That’s a long time.
And I did the math, and I think at that point in time, roughly speaking, assets in ETS were roughly just 10 percent, 12 percent of assets in mutual funds and I was pretty convinced that that number was to increase significantly. I remember telling myself, why would anyone invest in mutual funds when you can buy an ETF instead?
.” It’s really helpful to have had five other meetings with people who sit at analogous funds that had losses that were just as big, and in fact, they may have contributed to those losses more and be able to tell him, first off, your fund, just by my math, has a $250 million management fee. So why rock the boat?
So like a component of it was like the standard derivatives math, right? And so like, you know, I got there and I learned derivatives math, right? It was derivatives math, it was like working with the traders on like riskmanagement. Like, like the, you know, like the accounting standards.
I — I loved math, but really, I was going to go down that literature route more than anything else and — and study Spanish literature. BITTERLY MICHELL: … riskmanagement. I wasn’t that typical person that did a number of, you know, internships during the summer, had that …. BITTERLY MICHELL: … was — no, no.
DAVIS: A big part of it is really around when there’s more complicated corporate actions that are happening that entail a level of risk. There’s conversations that happen with our riskmanagement department to make sure we’re comfortable in terms of what kind of exposure that creates in the fund.
RITHOLTZ: So hold the duration risk aside with those two, but just for an investor in treasuries, I know you’ve done the math before. If you’re giving up that 1% big fat yield in 2019, 2021, let’s say you give up three years of 1% and get zero, how does the math work over the subsequent couple of years?
Even the guy you think of so highly, you know, after three hedge funds open and close, you got to wonder if there’s some riskmanagement issue there. And all these formally high performers are now just so big, they’re very happy collecting the management fee and the performance fee matters less. RITHOLTZ: Yeah.
BORISH: So one of the geniuses of Paul in really understanding futures markets in general is that most of the innovative riskmanagement approaches came out of the futures markets because of the using margin. So now what do you do with riskmanagement? What were you trading and what was he looking at?
So, the Portfolio Solutions Group advises mainly institutional clients on all kinds of challenges that they have and thinking about the expected returns, portfolio construction, riskmanagement, et cetera. And then in addition, we write lots of papers. I speak in many conferences. RITHOLTZ: Right. That makes a lot of sense.
And so the other thing is, is that, and I think it’s our core riskmanagement culture, is that we think that till risk is way more probable than everyone else does. And I was always good at math and, and I had been writing code since I was in the sixth grade. So I had real support around Wall Street.
It’s, it’s no different But, but inherently in futures, a whole lot more leverage, a whole lot more risk. How fundamental was that to your learning about investing, trading riskmanagement, starting with futures? You’re doing a lot of math in your head on the Fly.
So, I did the math, 20 million times a hundred. This guy just hired me, the management of this trawler fleet to advise them on whether the management should exercise their legitimate right under the privatization program of Russia to buy 51 percent. So, let me just repeat the math. How many do you have in your fleet?
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