Matt Levine: preference

Transcript context

…I think, like a lot of people, a lot of it is panic. [laughter] I think, like a lot of people, a lot of it is panic. [laughter] I tell you what, I at various points thought of being a law professor. I thought of being a classics professor, and I never could write papers. I turned in my final paper in law school two weeks after graduation. When I thought about leaving my job as a banker to become a blogger, my girlfriend — now wife — was like, “Remember how you didn’t write your papers in law school? Are you sure you want to do this?” [laughter] What I think is, people have their proper metabolism for producing stuff. For me, I wouldn’t say it’s easy. It’s incredibly difficult, but it is reliable that I can produce something in a panic every day. Whereas, I think if I had to produce something every week — and I have some experience with this — if I have to produce something every week, I do it about every three weeks. That’s one thing, is just the drive of panic. The other thing is, I try to be pretty ruthlessly focused on places where I have an advantage or where I can add value. One nice thing about working at Bloomberg is that if I don’t write about something, someone else will write about it. I don’t ever write about things because someone needs to write about it. If I write about it, it’s because I have something to say about it. That, I think, is a rare and valuable flexibility to have. My beat, I’m not doing things because I have to do them. Those are main things. The other thing that I have is, I worked on this weird derivatives desk at a bank where I was an investment banker, so I covered corporate clients. I went to meet with corporate clients with coverage bankers who did M&A. I was also selling them equity derivative products, which were booked against our trading desk and where we were acting as a principal. I was also underwriting convertible bonds. I was seeing a lot of different sides of a bank and exposed to a lot of different ways of being in finance. The life of an investment banker is very different from the life of a VAL trader. I was, to some extent, bridging those lives, which was helpful. The other thing I was doing is, I was explaining fairly complicated products to smart people who did not know anything about them. You’d go to a CFO and be like, “What you want to do is an uncapped collared ASB with variable maturity.” They’d be like . . . Then you’d have to explain to them, not what the thing was — because they don’t care what the set of legal documents are — but what the economic intuitions behind it are. That explaining economic intuitions to a smart person about a thing that is complicated is, I think, valuable in my current job. The other thing that was valuable about that is that the economic intuitions I was explaining to the CFO were not necessarily the economic intuitions that we had. We were doing the trade for something, for some exposure that we wanted or some set of payoffs that we got. They were doing the trading for some other set of payoffs, and it wasn’t like we were betting against them. he trade for something, for some exposure that we wanted or some set of payoffs that we got. They were doing the trading for some other set of payoffs, and it wasn’t like we were betting against them. It was like we had two overlapping sets of interests in the trade. Having some awareness of that is useful in looking at complicated financial things, that different people can be getting something different and complicated out of a trade that is not necessarily described in the public documents for that trade.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.