Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

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Thoughts:

-I love reading Matt's stuff. The praise of his writing is totally deserving.

-In my daily life there's rarely a topic I come across that I'm unable to understand. In an otherwise boring day full of mundane work tasks, his column gives me intellectual challenges that I really appreciate.

-Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there?

-He was valedictorian at Harvard and became a public high school teacher after!?

-Apparently MoneyStuff has 150,000 subscribers, the total income+power of which is gigantic (multiple billionaire readers along with presumably many thousands of high 6-7 figure readers). But yet they don't seem to do much at all of monetizing it (there's an easily bypassed Bloomberg paywall and a tiny ad in the text of the email newsletter).

-I would really love a weekly Matt Levine podcast. But sadly I don't think we'll ever get that.

> -Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there?

Investment banker here.. "Wall Street" is a pretty big concept, not unlike "Silicon Valley".

So in the best banks and the best groups, yes – I'd say he's among the very best, but there are plenty of similarly smart people around.

Having said that, I obviously have no insight into whether he was actually good at all the other things that make a great "banker". To stick to the same analogy, one can be a prolific coder but be absolutely terrible about writing docs and tests, keeping a sane git workflow, prioritizing, communicating, being a team player, etc.

Matt's said before that he reached a certain point at GS where he was expected to get more involved in sales, as opposed to just the structuring side of his desk, and felt he was quite bad at it.

Probably quite a bit of self depreciation on Matt's part though given that when he decided to quit his boss essentially said, "Why don't you just, you know, take some time off to think about it?"

I'd say someone with Matt's background and general mannerisms - even at GS where eccentricity and raw intellect, for lack of better descriptors, are traditionally valued - would be a significant outlier.

I worked at GS and I think the only people that fit the Levine mold were in weird structuring desks, like Matt was. In particular, PFI had quite a few characters that remind me of Matt. Ali Meli, who left GS recently and was written up by Bloomberg, comes to mind. Clearly intellectually above others with weird, interesting perspectives on things. Also given leash to go dream up and do weird and interesting things.

I don't think people like Matt actually have much value add in most areas of a modern investment bank, unfortunately. As Matt says: banking is boring now. I don't see how someone like Matt would succeed is traditional banking - or a flow trading desk - over the "average" GS employee who studied finance at Wharton or whatever. Most areas of banking strike me as having become very commoditized or routinized and outliers are viewed as more apt to cause tail risk than anything.

You have to be smart to trade flow derivatives. Not only is it necessary to understand the product and pricing tools, but also you have less time to examine any given trade than your customer does, you have to deal with weird correlations and dispersions that were forced upon you by customers, your social skills and sixth/"I'm getting played" sense are just as much a part of your toolkit as are your math skills, and you aren't given too much leeway with mark-to-market p&l.

You probably noticed at GS that a risk desk won't put an employee in front of a book just because he got good grades at UPenn.

Thanks for the insight. My perspective is from the M&A side which can be a little bit different / less boring (or at least I like to tell myself so)

I'm sitting in a large room filled with bloomberg terminals, each costing 2k a month. MoneyStuff isn't monetized much directly, but plays into the larger business plan.

I too would love that podcast.

His level of intellect is pretty common at Wachtell. Those people are sharp. Levine worked there as an associate out of law school.

> -Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there?

Intelligence is 100% absolutely not a prerequisite but anyone who rises above a certain level in finance has to be talented at something. At a bank that's likely to be either sales or politics.

> -I would really love a weekly Matt Levine podcast. But sadly I don't think we'll ever get that.

I don't know that you do. I've found him to be a much better writer than speaker - the content was similar (brilliant, funny, interesting, etc) but his spoken delivery simply isn't very good, and where do you put a footnote in a podcast?

He went on Tyler Cowen's podcast

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