Category Archives: Corporate Life

Dilbert-like thoughts

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Termination

The last lifecycle event of a trade is, of course, its termination. It can be triggered for a variety of reasons. Whatever the reason may be, when a trade is terminated, it calls for settlements and documentation archival by Back Office. In addition, it may trigger public disclosures (in an aggregate form) by Finance, and incentive adjustments by Human Resources.

The common reasons for trade termination and the workflow it triggers are depicted in the figure below.

Trade termination

  • Trade Maturity: When a trade or an option reaches maturity, it gets terminated, which is the most uneventful mode of trade termination.
  • Option Exercises: If the bank or its counterparty exercises an option, it gets terminated. Exercises can take place any time during the lifetime of a trade, or only on specific dates, depending on the termsheet description of the product involved.
  • Barrier Breaches: Barrier options (or knock-in and knock-out options) may breach the pre-defined barriers and may get terminated generating settlements or new trades.
  • Target Triggers: Instruments that accumulate toward a target (such as range accruals or target redemption forwards) may get terminated when the target is reached.
  • Trade Novation: Novation is the special process by which the trade counterparty changes. In effect, the original counterparty sells the the trade or the option to another one. When a novation happens, the original trade is terminated and a new one initiated with special characteristics.
Corporate Life, Humor, Life and Death, Malayalam

Retirement — a Wife’s View

In connection with my recent retirement, my wife sent me an article (a speech given by someone on how to retire happily) which made several interesting points. But even more interestingly, it started with a funny story. Here it is:

In a small village in Kerala, a devout christian passed away. The local priest was out of station, and a priest from an adjoining village was called upon to deliver the eulogy. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” began the venerable pastor with the coffin before him. “Here lies dead before me a rare human being of this village with outstanding qualities. He was a gentleman, a scholar, sweet of tongue, gentle of temper and very catholic in outlook. He was generous to a fault and ever smiling.” The widow of the deceased sprang up and screamed, “Oh my God! They are burying the wrong man!”

True to form, this gentleman concluded his speech with another story.

First God created the cow and said, “You must go with the farmer everyday to the field, and suffer under the sun all day long, have calves, give milk and help the farmer. I give you a span of sixty years.” The cow said, “That’s surely tough. Give me only twenty years. I give back forty years.”

On Day Two, God created the dog and said, “Sit by the door of your house and bark at strangers. I give you a span of twenty years.” The dog said, “Too long a life for barking. I give up ten years.”

On the third day, God created the monkey and said to him, “Entertain people. Make them laugh. I give you twenty years.” The monkey said to God, “How boring! Monkey tricks for twenty years? Give me only ten years.” The Lord agreed.

On the fourth day, God created Man. He said to him, “Eat, sleep, play, enjoy and do nothing. I will give you twenty years.”

Man said, “Only twenty years? No way! I will take my twenty, but give me the forty the cow gave back, the ten that the monkey returned, and the ten the dog surrendered. That makes it eighty. Okay?” God agreed.

That is why for the first twenty years we sleep, play, enjoy and do nothing.
For the next forty years we slave in the sun to support our family.
For the next ten years we do monkey tricks to entertain our grandchildren.
And for the last ten years we sit in front of the house and bark at everybody.

Well, I managed to cut down my forty cow-years to a mere twenty. Here’s hoping that I will get similar discounts on my monkey and dog years!

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Validation and Processing

Once a trade is booked into the trading platform database, it triggers a whole chorus of validation and daily processing. The validation process is a to-and-fro dance between the trading desks in Front Office and the control units in Middle Office, all mediated by the trading platform. The traders may insert a trade on an experimental basis. Once they are convinced that it is a viable trade, they push it to a confirmed state, which will be picked up by the treasury control unit. If the traders decide to discard the trade, the trade ends up in the trash pile (but never deleted permanently). The control unit typically works in a four-eye, double validation mode. They verify the trade inputs, and control limits such as the number of trades allowed for a particular product. If the trade passes their tests, they set its status to a validated state, which triggers a second level of checking. If the trade fails either level, they are pushed back into a state that allows the traders to either amend it or discard it.

Trade validation

Once the trade is fully validated, the processing part begins. It involves multiple teams and multiple perspectives, starting from how a trade should be identified to what the basic information unit that should be identified.

Daily Processing

As shown in the figure above, regular processing takes place in various business units.

  • Trading Desks monitor trades for hedging and rebalancing, monitoring profit and loss (P/L), and staying within the risk limits. The senior traders get distilled information from the junior ones through this regular processing and take appropriate actions.
  • Middle Office plays a crucial role in regular process. They monitor target and barrier breaches, rate fixings and option exercises, cash flow generation, and spawning other cash trades. They generate (with the help of the trading platform) appropriate accounting triggers for Back Office to act on, in order to perform settlements, trade confirmation, documentation archival etc.
  • Product Control is another business unit embedded within the middle office that actively monitor the P/L on a daily basis, with a view to explaining their movements based on the sensitivities and market movements, providing an independent computation of the profitability of the trading activity. Their computations of reserves feed into the finance and human resources departments and affect trader incentives and compensation.
  • Market Risk Management also has hordes of staff employed to perform daily monitoring of trading limits (such as notionals, delta-equivalents etc.) as well as VaR computation, Stress VaR tests. In most banks, they also handle compliance reporting to regulatory authorities and provide concise and actionable intelligence to the upper management who decide the trading strategies.

As we shall soon see, the different and specific focus of each business unit demands a unique projection (which we will call a perspective) of the trading information from the trading platform. This requirement is one of the things that make its design and implementation so challenging.

Corporate Life

Capitalism vs. Corporatism

During a recent conversation with him, this client of mine used the word “corporatist” to describe his country (US of A). He said twenty years ago, they were a capitalist country, not a corporatist one. Now, this is a kind of fine distinction that I’d love to talk about. To me, it was a surprising and illuminating distinction, one that cleanly dissects and clears up the economic confusion of our times. And I had to write about it.

Everybody knows what capitalism is. It is the market-driven, private-ownership-centric economic system where selfish motives bring about collective happiness, according to Adam Smith. This way of life has been accepted as the “good” system, and stands in stark contrast with the collective, community-owned economic system with notions of robust social redistribution of wealth — communism or socialism. Although the latter does sound like a better and more moral ideal, at least in principle, it never did pan out that way.

Corporatism is not as well-known as capitalism. At least, I didn’t know that such a word existed. But the moment I heard it, I could guess what it meant. It points to the end product of unbridled capitalism, one with no government control, or even moral hangups. In my view, it happens this way — once you have private ownership, some people get richer than the rest. There is nothing wrong with that; in fact, it is a mathematical certainty. But then, money gives those lucky guys more power, and access to ways in which they can make more money. For instance, they can influence the political system, and through it the fiscal and taxation policies. Also, private ownerships can be pooled together to form economic organisms that can sustain themselves. These organisms are, of course, corporate bodies. They exert power through their collective wealth to an even greater extent than the good old capitalists.

A curious thing happens when capitalists (simple rich folks, that is) get sidelined by corporations. The money and power get separated in a strange way. The board members and CEOs who control the corporate bodies end up wielding power, instead of the owners. They are entrusted with the task of guarding and growing the capital. They find novel strategies to do this, like taking advantage of tax loopholes and tax havens, and engaging in unsavory business practices (like mixing any damn white powder with baby food, for instance). As long as they succeed in their remit of growing the capital, they seem to absolve themselves of the moral implications of their actions. For their services, they pay themselves handsome rewards. Note that the corporatists (the operators) pay themselves; it is not as though the capitalists (the owners) pay them, wherein lies the separation of power and money.

When you bring in the financial system whose primary function is capital management, the separation of power, money and morality takes on a new dimension. So banks, with no intrinsic economic value of their own, turn out to be too big to fail, and the system rearranges itself in such way that even when they do fail, it is the people farthest removed from power and money are the ones who pay for it. The high-flying bankers and senior managers get golden parachutes because they have both power and money. The trickle-down economy envisioned in pure capitalism (an optimistic vision to begin with) only trickles through channels drawn by the corporate overlords.

These unfair trickles did not bother us (the middle class) for a long time because they were not all trickling away from us. Now that they have started to, we are beginning to sit up and protest. I sympathize with my American client. Now that the corporatists are after our little trickles, we hate corporatism.

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Trade Inception

The inception events of a trade can be classified into two categories. The pre-trade activities are those that have to take place even before the first trade is booked. The per-trade inception activities are the ones specific to each trade.

Pre-trade activities

The pre-trade activities are related to new product on-boarding and approval. As we saw, in-house trading platforms are designed to be nimble and responsive. In principle, it should take little time for a new product to be on-boarded. The last system I worked on, for instance, was designed to deploy a new product idea in a matter of minutes. But the architects of such systems tend to forget the human, process-related and control elements involved in it. As the slide above illustrates, a new product idea or a new pricing model originates from the work of a model quant or a structurer in Front Office. But before it gets anywhere near a production system, the pricing model needs to be validated, typically by the analytics team in the Middle Office risk management group. Once validated, the product goes through a tortuous approval process that may take weeks or months, and then a formal deployment process, which may again take weeks or months. When that process is completed, the product is available for trading in the trading platform.

Once available, the product can be instantiated as a trade. Each trade instance goes through its own validation and approval process. The trade request may originate from the sales or structuring team in Front Office. They will also prepare the term sheet and other legal documents. Once these tasks are completed, a trade is booked into the trading platform.

Per-trade process

These inception events are depicted in the second slide above. One of the crucial steps in the approval process is the credit control. As we described earlier, the credit risk management team uses a variety of tools to assess the risks involved. With their approval, and with the traders understanding of the market price of the product, a product available in the trading platform becomes a trade in the database. And the lifecycling fun begins.

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Life of a Trade

With the last post, we have reached the end of the second section on the static structure of the bank involved in trading activities. But a trade by itself is a dynamic entity. In this third section, we will look at the evolution of a trade, and see how it flows back and forth between the various business units we described in the last section. We will make the this section and the next into a new series of posts because the first series (on How Does a Bank Work?) has become a bit too long.

Back Office and Finance

As with most dynamic entities, trades also have the three lifecycle stages of inception, existence and termination. What we need to understand clearly is what the processes are around these general stages. What are the business units involved at each of these stages? What do they do? And how do they do it?

Trade lifecycle

We will see that from our perspective, the lifecycle interactions are all mediated by the trading platform. It is not so much because everything is contained within the trading platform, but because we are interested only in that limited set of processes that are. In some sense, the last section was about the physical, spatial description of the bank, and this section is going to be on the temporal evolution and dynamics of how things work on that structure.

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Summary – Structure of a Bank

We have now completed our discussion on the general structure of a typical investment bank trading arm. We went through the Front-Middle-Back Office divisions and the functional and business units contained within. Note that we looked only at those units that have a bearing on trading and quantitative development activities. Note also that this structure is fluid and may be implemented with different names and hierarchies in different banks depending on their corporate strategies and focus. We presented the trading platform as the enabler or backdrop of most of these activities of the global treasury (where exotics trading activities take place) and the associated business units (that handle various aspects of the trade workflow) mainly because we are looking at the whole thing from the quantitative development perspective.

Back Office and Finance

From this perspective, you see the trading platform as the most important tool (or collection of tools) in the bank. It mediates almost all the interactions among the various business units. Furthermore, as we shall see in future posts, the trading platform defines the trade workflow and lifecycle management. Therefore, it will also become important for the quantitative developers to understand how these business units view trades and the trade booking and management process. Their trade perspectives will have to influence the design of the trading platform.

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance

Back Office, Finance et al

From the quant and quantitative development perspective, Back Office is a distant entity. Their role is vital in the trade lifecycle, as we shall see later, but they are outside the sphere of influence of the quants and developers.

Back Office and Finance

Back Office concerns itself mainly with trade settlements and accounting. Upon maturity, each trade generates a settlement trigger usually with the help of a vended trading or settlement platform, which will be picked up and acted upon by the Back Office professionals. They also take care of cash and collateral management.

Finance functions are closely related to Back Office operations. Among a host of accounting related operations, they have one critically important task, which is to produce annual reports. These reports get publicly scrutinized and determine everything from the stock price to performance bonuses, salary levels etc. Finance professionals may require quant and analytic help for certain tasks. In one of my previous roles, I was asked to estimate the fair market value of the employee stock options (ESOP) for the purpose of accounting for them in the annual reports.

The process of pricing ESOP is similar to (although a bit more complicated than) normal call option pricing. Among other things, you need the volatility of the underlying stock in order to calculate the price. I used the standard exponentially weighted moving average method to estimate it from the published stock prices over the previous two years or so to compute it because that was all the data I had access to. Before that time, there was some corporate action and stock ticker name had changed (or did not exist, I don’t remember which). In any case, I knew that the impact of adding more data prior to that date would be negligible because of the exponentially diminishing weights; it would be much less that the round off error in quoting the price to four decimal places, for instance. But the accountant who was asked to look at the computation was upset. She came to me with her rulebook and referred me to page 57, paragraph 2, where it was specified that I was supposed to use ten years for the EWMA computation. I tried, in vain, to explain to her that I couldn’t. She kept saying, “Yeah, but page 57, para 2….” I went on to explain why it didn’t really make any difference. She said, “Yeah, but page 57, para 2….”

Accountants and Finance professionals can be that way. They can be a bit “technical” about such things. In hindsight, I guess I was being naive. I could have just used a series of zeros to back-populate the missing eight years of data (after all, if the ticker price was not quoted, it is zero), and redone my ESOP valuation, which would have given an ESOP price identical to what I computed earlier, but this time satisfying both Finance and the quants.

IT and other support

A team which quantitative developers work closely with is Information Technology. They are charged with the IT infrastructure, security, networking, procurement, licensing and everything else related to computing. In fact, quantitative development is, as I portrayed it earlier, a middle layer between IT and pure mathematical work. So it is possible for quantitative developers to find themselves under the IT hierarchy, although it doesn’t work to their advantage. Information Technology is a cost center, as are all other Middle and Back Office functions, while Front Office units connected to trading are profit centers. Profit generators get compensated far better than others, and it is better to be associated with them than IT.

Corporate Life, Philosophy, Physics, Quantitative Finance

My Life, My Way

After almost eight years in banking, I have finally called it quits. Over the last three of those years, I had been telling people that I was leaving. And I think people had stopped taking me seriously. My wife certainly did, and it came as a major shock to her. But despite her studied opposition, I managed to pull it off. In fact, it is not just banking that I left, I have actually retired. Most of my friends greeted the news of my retirement with a mixture of envy and disbelief. The power to surprise — it is nice to still have that power.

Why is it a surprise really? Why would anyone think that it is insane to walk away from a career like mine? Insanity is in doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Millions of people do the same insanely crummy stuff over and over, everyone of them wanting nothing more than to stop doing it, even planning on it only to postpone their plans for one silly reason or another. I guess the force of habit in doing the crummy stuff is greater than the fear of change. There is a gulf between what people say their plans are and what they end up doing, which is the theme of that disturbing movie Revolutionary Road. This gulf is extremely narrow in my case. I set out with a bunch of small targets — to help a few people, to make a modest fortune, to provide reasonable comfort and security to those near. I have achieved them, and now it is time to stop. The trouble with all such targets is that once you get close to them, they look mundane, and nothing is ever enough for most people. Not for me though — I have always been reckless enough to stick to my plans.

One of the early instances of such a reckless action came during my undergraduate years at IIT Madras. I was pretty smart academically, especially in physics. But I wasn’t too good in remembering details like the names of theorems. Once, this eccentric professor of mine at IIT asked me the name of a particular theorem relating the line integral of the electric field around a point and the charge contained within. I think the answer was Green’s theorem, while its 3-D equivalent (surface integral) is called Gauss’s theorem or something. (Sorry, my Wikipedia and Google searches didn’t bring up anything definitive on that.) I answered Gauss’s theorem. The professor looked at me for a long moment with contempt in his eyes and said (in Tamil) something like I needed to get a beating with his slippers. I still remember standing there in my Khakki workshop attire and listening to him, with my face burning with shame and impotent anger. And, although physics was my favorite subject (my first love, in fact, as I keep saying, mostly to annoy my wife), I didn’t go back to any of his lectures after that. I guess even at that young age, I had this disturbing level of recklessness in me. I now know why. It’s is the ingrained conviction that nothing really matters. Nothing ever did, as Meursault the Stranger points out in his last bout of eloquence.

I left banking for a variety of reasons; remuneration wasn’t one of them, but recklessness perhaps was. I had some philosophical misgivings about the rightness of what I was doing at a bank. I suffered from a troubled conscience. Philosophical reasons are strange beasts — they lead to concrete actions, often disturbing ones. Albert Camus (in his collection The Myth of Sisyphus) warned of it while talking about the absurdity of life. Robert Pirsig in his epilog to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance also talked about when such musings became psychiatrically dangerous. Michael Sandel is another wise man who, in his famous lectures on Justice: What is the Right Thing to Do? pointed out that philosophy could often color your perspective permanently — you cannot unlearn it to go back, you cannot unthink a thought to become normal again.

Philosophy and recklessness aside, the other primary reason for leaving the job was boredom. The job got so colossally boring. Looking out my window at the traffic 13 floors below was infinitely more rewarding than looking at the work on my three computer screens. And so I spent half my time staring out the window. Of course, my performance dwindled as a result. I guess scuttling the performance is the only way to realistically make oneself leave a high-paying job. There are times when you have have to burn the bridges behind you. Looking back at it now, I cannot really understand why I was so bored. I was a quantitative developer and the job involved developing reports and tools. Coding is what I do for fun at home. That and writing, of course. May be the boredom came from the fact that there was no serious intellectual content in it. There was none in the tasks, nor in the company of the throngs of ambitious colleagues. Walking into the workplace every morning, looking at all the highly paid people walking around with impressive demeanors of doing something important, I used to feel almost sad. How important could their bean-counting ever be?

Then again, how important could this blogging be? We get back to Meursault’s tirade – rien n’avait d’importance. Perhaps I was wrong to have thrown it away, as all of them keep telling me. Perhaps those important-looking colleagues were really important, and I was the one in the wrong to have retired. That also matters little; that also has little importance, as Meursault and my alter ego would see it.

What next is the question that keeps coming up. I am tempted to give the same tongue-in-cheek answer as Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge — Loaf! My kind of loafing would involve a lot of thinking, a lot of studying, and hard work. There is so much to know, and so little time left to learn.

Photo by kenteegardin

Books, Corporate Life, Quantitative Finance, Uncategorized

Rates and Valuation

Marking trades to market requires up-to-date market data. There are two types of market data required for pricing — one is the live spot rates, volatilities, interest rates etc. This type of data is collectively called rates. The second type is the kind that goes into defining the products being traded, or the characteristics of the rates. These include definitions of interest rate pillars, bond coupon dates and rates etc. This second type is considered static data.

Valuation and Product Control

The rates management team is in charge of the first type data. They ensure that the live data providers are consistent with each other and that the data itself is accurate. They do this by applying various automated tests and limits to the incoming rates to flag any suspicious movement or inconsistency. Once approved by the team, the data gets consumed by the trading platform. The rates management is a critical role, and the market data is often stored and served in dedicated databases and services. Because of the technicalities involved, this team works closely with the information technology professionals.

The static data is typically managed by a separate team independent of rates management. They go by various names, Treasury Control being one of them. They set up traded products and rates pillars and so on. In some banks, they may also be responsible for trade input data validation.

Two other important functions of Middle Office are valuation and product controls. These functions are pretty far removed from quantitative development and trading platform. These teams ensure that the trade valuations and P/L movements are consistent with market movements. Valuation Control takes a close look at pricing and P/L mostly at trade level while Product Control worries about P/L explanation typically at portfolio level. Since we have the Greeks (rates of change of product prices with respect to market quantities and time), we can compute and predict the change in the prices (or P/L movements) using Taylor series expansion. If the independently computed prices (using actual market rates) are at odds with the predicted ones, it points to an internal inconsistency and should trigger a detailed investigation.

Product Control may also help Finance and Human Resource with valuation reserves process, which estimates the level of exaggeration in the profit expectations of ebullient traders. Since traders’ compensation is tied to the profit they generate, this process of assigning reserves against profit is essential in ensuring equitable performance rewards.