The Buy Side Book
LINK >> https://blltly.com/2tle3U
Forget what you've read, forget what you've heard, forget what you've been taught. Monkey Business pulls off Wall Street's suspenders and gives the listener the inside skinny on real life at an investment bank, where the promised land is always one more 20-hour workday and another lap dance away. Fresh out of Wharton and Harvard business schools, John Rolfe and Peter Troob ran willingly into the open arms of investment bank giant Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette. They escaped with the remnants of their sanity - and, ultimately, this book.
How eager to please was brought home stunningly to Turney in 1999 when he arrived at the Galleon Group, a colossal hedge-fund management firm run by secretive founder Raj Rajaratnam. Finally in a position to trade on his own, Turney was encouraged to socialize with the sell side and siphon from his new broker friends as much information as possible. Soon he was not just vacuuming up valuable tips but also being lured into a variety of hedonistic pursuits. Naive enough to believe he could keep up the lifestyle without paying a price, he managed to keep an eye on his buy-and-sell charts and, meanwhile, pondered the strange goings on at Galleon, where tens of millions were being made each week in sometimes mysterious ways.
And an interesting story it is although Duff's editor should have told him to be a little more liberal with the juicy details. Other than his R-rated dalliances with an aging prostitute, we only hear in generalities of the presumably innumerable exploits with women his new money wealth, good looks and cocaine-fueled insomnia attracted. Related, we also only hear of the insider trading at Galleon, a hedge fund the SEC would take out long after Duff's tenure (and that's saying given how much they miss The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust). Certainly, Duff's dirty double-dealing extended further than that and given from his epilogue said he has nothing left, getting sued should be an issue. Having said that enough sex, drugs (and more and more and more drugs) and monetary adventurism saturate the book to carry you all the way through.
Here I am, a 32-year-old, flying around on private jets, going to the Super Bowl, going to Sundance, taking helicopters to the Hamptons. This was all because I had $30 million to $50 million in commissions to pay the sell side. And those are big numbers.
This is a book of redemption. Turney Duff acknowledges that writing about his experience has been more fulfilling and cathartic. This book is a step in making amends but also provides a ring side view about a section of Wall Street that does not abide by the rules.
Turney Duff's The Buy Side is every Wall Street memoir and every addiction memoir in one. Duff, a hedge fund trader who, not surprisingly, developed a nasty cocaine habit, documents his unlikely rise from solidly middle-class Kennebunkport, Maine, to Ohio University (where he got a journalism degree) and, eventually, to Morgan Stanley and a series of hedge funds, including a stint with that of convicted insider trader kingpin Raj Rajaratnam's Galleon Group. The book is subtitled A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess, and on that it totally delivers: line after line after line after line after line. But the "spectacular excess" is little more than one finance cliché after another, packing less punch than the very mediocre recent disillusioned-by-Wall Street memoir, Why I Left Goldman Sachs by Greg Smith, and the classic that defined the genre: Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker.
Duff, like the rest of Wall Street, spends much of the narrative fixated on his bonus. His "low" $200,000 salary "barely covers the bills," and he depends on a bonus several times that amount to cover his vacations, personal shoppers, and rent on his triplex. He goes into work on New Year's Eve and tries to squeeze out whatever trading gains he can to get a bigger bonus and books $10 million in trading profits after mildly screwing over one of his brokers by canceling short-sell orders and then buying the stocks. The next chapter is just a picture of a check for $1,864,999, the amount of his take-home pay in 2003.
Smith's book started with a New York Times op-ed that he wrote while he was working in London. Before he distilled his disappointment with Goldman into the Times, he began to write compulsively: "Writing was my way to distill into simple terms exactly what I felt was wrong." He wrote "on airplanes, in airport lounges, in hotel rooms, and in my flat late at night" for three months before it occurred to him to speak out publicly. The result: one of the most-read Times op-eds of all time and the subsequent memoir.
Asset managers and owners are consistently challenged by unwieldy, inefficient operating models and poor data governance. Aladdin addresses this by providing clients with a real-time investment book of record (Ibor), delivered through a common data language across risk, portfolio management, trading, operations and compliance.
New York-based BlackRock follows up its two successes in these awards last year by winning the best buy-side Ibor category, thanks to its well-established Aladdin platform. Recent enhancements to the platform include continued integration with the eFront platform and the availability of Aladdin Studio APIs, allowing users to develop their own customized investment management workflows on top of the Aladdin platform. Next on the agenda for Aladdin are new accounting capabilities featuring integrated Ibor/Abor/Pbor functionality that will no doubt strike a chord with its very substantial buy-side user base.
Luke has a decade of experience in buy side risk managementworking at CQS and Bluebay Asset Management. As product manager, heis responsible for the design and build of FRA's next generationbuy side risk management platform.Luke holds a BEng in Aerospace Engineering with first classhonours from the University of Southampton.
In the quest to generate alpha and improve investment returns, more buy-side firms are adopting multi-asset trading. In this blog post, I will discuss the three major global trends that are driving this shift and their impact on requirements for portfolio and risk management, based on findings from a recent Aite Group survey.
At the same time this evolution in trading is occurring, markets of all kinds, from OTC platforms to actual listed exchanges, are popping up everywhere in many different asset classes and products. For instance, currently there are more than a dozen swap execution facilities (SEFs), still more new fixed income platforms, many derivatives exchanges, and new cash equities models. Firms want to connect to as many markets as possible in their global search for alpha. As such, firms must consider more than just connectivity. Once they access derivatives and fixed income markets, they also need to aggregate the prices, eventually on a multi-asset basis. This requires heavy-duty technology in many cases.
Buy-side firms that once relied on the sell-side for pricing, risk, and valuation now need to do these things themselves. These added responsibilities require technology that buy-sides may not have. Also, while buy-side firms are not necessarily acting as market-makers, they are doing price-making, so they need tools that offer them speedy scenario-based pricing abilities in order to opportunistically make prices and capture promising trading opportunities.
Additionally, regulation is being pushed to a pre-trade basis. This means that buy-side firms need to take on more responsibility in compliance and regulation, which require enhanced price aggregation and corresponding technology updates.
A recent Aite Group study surveyed major Tier-1 and Tier-2 buy- and sell-side firms throughout the world to explore what factors are pushing them in a multi-asset direction. Over half of the respondents averaged more than US$500 billion in trading each year. 43% of those surveyed were buy-side firms, while 57% were sell-sides.
Many buy-side firms surveyed said they engage in a wide range of trading methods. Top among these are electronic, voice, and listed trading. These buy-sides also have a wide range of ways they manage risk, with many doing risk management on a pre-trade basis.
When the buy-side firm respondents were asked whether they had a real-time, pre- and post-trade risk management system in place, half reported they did, while 28% have plans to do so. This trend indicates the majority of firms realize the increased importance of real-time risk management.
In terms of technology priorities, one might think execution would top the list for buy-side firms. However, the study proved otherwise, as indicated in this chart showing compliance as the top priority, followed by execution and then risk management.
Furthermore, the buy-sides surveyed reported the top two areas of business growth included expanding into new asset classes and emerging markets. This trend indicates the high priority they place on connecting to as many markets as possible in their global search for alpha.
The valuation job is not a cakewalk. Some illiquid parameters can hardly be implied and will need to be monitored closely. These parameters can considerably impact the whole trading book. Some market consensus data providers such as Totem can be used to mark some illiquid parameters at some market consensus between institutions active in the market. 59ce067264