The technical problems in finance are more difficult that most in the average startup and the pay better. If you are one of the few people in the world who have the technical skills that these companies look for, then why would start at a startup rather than go into finance?
I've been thinking about this for a few days, and the best answer I can come up with has something to do with culture. In finance, you're extremely secretive. Secrecy is downright unhackerish. Working for 10 years, amassing a fortune, and no one knows who you are or what you've done. Which is why I call finance the silent killer. You disappear into this pile of money. Anyone else want to share their feelings on this?
Hedge funds typically charge 20% of profits and 2% of assets. Let's say you spend your $100K paying a lawyer to incorporate you, and you take a year off to raise your first $5 million. Over the next four years, your earnings would start at $250K for year two, and hit $332K by year five. Even accounting for the missed year, the earnings from starting a hedge fund would be an order of magnitude higher than those from running your own money.
This is obviously simplified (I'm ignoring taxes and inflation, which if nothing else will get me dirty looks from my fellow libertarians), but it should illustrate why so many PhDs are getting rich running money for second-generation MBAs.
The tricky part is a.) finding investors to give you money and b.) investing that money well. Your limited partners have to be "accredited investors", which means they need income of over $200K for the last 2 years or a net worth over $1M. Obviously, it takes a fair amount of persuasion to convince someone to fork over a million dollars. But if you've got a Ph.D in physics or successful experience on Wall Street, it's not all that hard.
One of the points PG makes in his essays is that it's absurdly cheap (in terms of capital required) to start a startup: if you have a computer and an Internet connection, it's not much more expensive than doing nothing at all. This changes your risk perception: startups can afford to hire unusual developers doing obscure stuff, because someone with a 10% chance of utterly destroying the business is just going to change your odds of failure from 90% to 91%.
Hedge funds and i-banks don't have that sort of equation: they're brutally competitive (you can start a new service and hope that Google doesn't know about it until you're too big not to be bought -- but if you start trading an obscure derivative, everyone is going to find out about it) and they tend to be risking millions of dollars of other peoples' money. So they're crazily cautious, which shows up in their hiring practices: one company I work with brags about rejecting all but one in five hundred candidates (yes. Their acceptance rate is less than MIT-squared), while another requires a BS/MS/PhD with a minimum GPA of 3.7 to be considered for an entry-level job. To attract people, they offer the ridiculous salaries you pointed out -- but there's an equilibrium between the absurd compensation and the absurd lengths you'd have to go to earn it.
If you want to talk to some quants, try: http://www.nuclearphynance.com/
At the end of the day, the financial industry is all about making money. If you do a good job, it means you and your customers get rich, and some other shmuck out there gets poor. Unfortunately, it's a zero-sum game. If you do well in the market, it has to be because someone else is doing poorly. Either that, or the market is bubbling upwards ahead of a crash.
I kinda want my life to be meaningful in addition to lucrative. I'd like to think that I've produced something that makes other people's lives nicer and doesn't just transfer wealth from them to me. Finance doesn't give you that - you can go home with a fat paycheck, but that paycheck is your only legacy.
If you're into money, though, a hedge fund is definitely the place to be. The hours are reasonable, the work is challenging, and the compensation is out of this world. I just can't shake the feeling that my industry is somehow "dirty". (And I don't even work directly for the big funds...I work for a small software shop that supplies some of the smaller funds.)
Have you read Hayek? I think it's hard to discount the importance of information. The market is able to do some pretty amazing stuff -- like tell you whether we, as consumers, would prefer more online stores or in-person stores or search engines or ranches. It's not as if the balance between those demands is intuitively obvious, and it's hard to believe that knowing the answer isn't worth making a few snotty New Yorkers pretty crazily rich.
Not that this is why anyone does it. We're all out there to get rich, but for the most part it's hard to make money without somehow making the market more informative. If you're right, you make the transactions that say so -- and you can't make those transactions without pushing prices in the direction they need to go.
I suppose you could argue that more accurate secondary-market prices help allocate capital more effectively when firms make primary security offerings. That's how I sleep at night. ;-) But as far as I can see, the market is plenty efficient already. That's why index funds are so popular.
I also really dislike the moral-hazard problem inherent in the 2/20 compensation structure for most hedge funds. When hedge funds make money, they take 20% of the profits, a huge windfall for the fund. However, when they lose money, it comes out of the capital put up by the original investors. It's very much a "heads I win tails you lose" structure. The incentive isn't toward better overall performance, it's towards higher variability of returns.
A hedge fund that makes 25% and loses 20% on alternate years ends up being a wash for investors (minus fees), but it nets its manager an average fee of 2.5% for their 20% of profits (ignoring the 2% of assets). A fund that makes 10% every year, steadily, will end up being worth twice as much for investors after 7 years, but will only make its manager 2% yearly in profit fees. The incentive isn't towards higher performance, it's towards higher risk-taking.
Here is a little explanation (ignoring the 2% management fees, irrelevant for this discussion):
The fund starts at let say $100 per share. It makes 25% (before fees) the first year, so a share is worth $125. The manager takes 20% of incentive fees ($5/share) so each share is actually worth $120. Hence: the net performance for the first year is %20, and the new High Water Mark is $120 per share.
The second year the fund loses 16.6%, so now a share is worth $100. No incentive fees are taken. The high water mark remains at $120/share.
The third year the fund does 25% again (before fees). So now a share is worth $125. The fund charges 20% of incentive fees on $125-$120 = 5$, that is to .say $1. Hence the fund is now worth $124/share and that's the new high water mark, and the net performance for this year is 24%.
Conclusion: Year, Net Performance, Hedge Fund Fees.
1, +20%, $5/share.
2, -16.7%, $0.
3, +24%, $1/share.
I think that should be enough as an explanation to understand that the incentive is definitely towards higher performances.
Now in the real world, since investors get in and get out (and are trying to time this), it can be good to lose a bit to get some new investors on board... but that's psychology, not finance.
I chose alternating 25/-20% returns because they make the math simple. Very few markets actually behave like this: instead, you're likely to get 5-10 years of excellent performance, followed by 3-5 years of incredibly depressing performance. The numbers become harder to figure with this, but qualitatively, the conclusion remains the same.
In practice, hedge funds often do well while whatever they invest in is rising, and then "blow up" entirely when they start to underperform and investors run for the exits. Think LTCM or Amaranth, and it happens regularly on a smaller scale. The managers make hefty fees in the good times, and the investors are left holding the bag when the fund blows up.
Man, this is a common fallacy. In the last 100 years the stock market index has gone up several orders of magnitude. How is this a zero-sum game? Or do you expect the DJIA to go back to 100 or whatever it started out at when this bubble pops? The world grows richer because people work and create value. There is stock market speculation, yes, but there is also genuine growth based on fundamentals.
Now it is possible that we are building up towards a more fundamental crash (peak oil, http://anthropik.com/2005/08/thesis-6-humans-are-still-pleistocene-animals , etc.). But I don't think you were talking about that. Perhaps it is all fundamentally zero-sum (http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/2025552, "Guns, germs and steel", http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2006/the_return_of_patriarchy). But in the frame of reference where the stock market continues to function it is def creating value.
The DJIA has gone from 89 to 15k because of the labor and ingenuity of American employees and entrepreneurs. New companies come out with new products, these products meet consumer needs, this creates value, this value is reflected in the company's earnings, and corporate earnings are reflected in the stock price. None of this happens because some quant sits at a computer and programs in mathematical models of prices. If Coca-Cola was still trading at 50 cents with its current earnings, everyone - financial professional or not - would be jumping on it. It wouldn't stay at 50 cents a share for long.
Some sort of stock market, with decent liquidity and abundant information, is necessary for proper functioning of the economy. But the stock market we have, where hedge funds colocate boxes on the exchange so that they can execute trades within milliseconds of new information coming in, is overkill. I think it's really sad that so many of the best and brightest minds are drawn into competing with each other instead of creating value for others.
I feel the same way about law, which is another necessary-but-zero-sum profession. It also tends to attract really smart people, perhaps because really smart people are used to being smarter than everyone else. The link to tournament economics that someone posted on another article here is quite appropriate.
Financial markets are what enables society to direct capital toward its most productive uses, and every time you find an arbitrage opportunity, you have just contributed a little to that goal; think of it as Gosplan, except that it actually works. This is perhaps easier to understand in the context of markets in physical goods. A merchant who notices that the difference in the price of widgets in towns A and B is smaller than the cost of transporting them, and starts doing so, is obviously realizing a net gain for society. Stocks and bonds aren't all that different from widgets.
Good laws make it possible for people to rely on contracts with complete strangers, rather than always having to laboriously build up bonds of trust, and they prevent people from imposing costs on third parties that never asked for them. While bad laws may be bad, good laws exist too, and lawyers do occasionally get involved in making them work.
There's a lot of small-government rhetoric out there about minimizing legislation. The analogous point to about minimizing litigation is also plausible.
I had some ideas about translating open-source bugtrackers to legislation: http://reddit.com/info/79lo/comments#c7awp
very well put. I'd add accounting to that list as well, particularly something as burdensome as sarbanes oxley
The financial industry is a huge prestige trap. It's hard for a young guy to give up a BMW M3 and million-dollar condo to work on an unpredictable startup. You can ask my friend and former partner :-)
To change the world?
Taking into account accelerating change, you're going to have more toys than you could ever possibly dream of in 20 years anyway.
I think, therefore, that the social status is more important than the money.
Plus, like Hollywood celebrities, people doing interesting stuff tend to hang out with other people doing interesting stuff. So if you want to have interesting conversations with interesting people, doing something interesting yourself goes a long way.