A few years ago, I had significant income from online advertising because of my networked business model that worked extremely well at that time. At one point the ad serving company decided to cancel my account because some sites in my network violated their terms and conditions. They told me that they couldn’t pay me for the last two months because they had already refunded the money to the advertisers who were outraged at my T & C violations. Mind you, it was a small fortune. But a couple of months later, they decided to reinstate me. The first thing they did after reactivating my account was to pay me my outstanding balance — the money they had “refunded” to their disgruntled advertisers. I, of course, was quite gruntled about the outcome. But the joy didn’t last; they banned me again a month later.
Category Archives: Work and Life
My thoughts on corporate life, work-life balance or the lack thereof and so on.
Uninsured by Default
Long time ago, I had a run-in with an insurance company. It was after my first trip back home from the US. During my four years in the sanitized and relatively virus-free conditions of upstate New York, my natural third-world immunity had deteriorated significantly, and I came back from India with a bad respiratory infection, which had stopped responding to the antibiotics my doctor uncle had prescribed me. So I went to the emergency room at the Tompkins County Hospital in Ithaca, where they determined that I had pneumonia. The medical bill came up to over $450, and had multiple parts to it, like the X-Ray, radiologist’s fees, physician’s fees, ER fee, pharmacy etc. For payment, I handed them my student insurance card and went home.
A couple of weeks later, the hospital called me to tell me that the insurance had refused to pay one out of the many bills and that I still owed them about $80. I found it weird and ask them to try again, and went back to my PhD and whatnot. Then the insurance company told me that they were refusing because the procedure was not “pre-approved.” Weirder — how could one part of the same ER visit have different reimbursement criteria? Anyway, I proceeded to ignore the bill, which soon got handed over to some collection agency who started making harassing calls to me.
The whole thing went on for a few months before I decided enough was enough. Luckily, my university had a free legal service. So I went and met Mike Matterson (or some such name) at the legal office. He listened to my plight sympathetically, and advised me that it was pointless fighting some small battles in which you would lose even if you won. But he called the insurance company and proceeded thus, “Hello, this is Mike Matterson, attorney at law, calling on behalf of Manoj Thulasidas. I would like to make a few enquiries.” True, he had to rehearse my name a few times, but he made the whole opening salvo sound impressive. At least, I was impressed with this courtroom drama unfolding before my very eyes. But nothing really happened and I went back to my Danby Road apartment determined to stretch the payment a few more weeks if possible.
But four days later, I get this letter from the insurance company stating that they had decided to pay the bill in full — pre-approved or not. I realized that a call from a lawyer meant something to the company. It meant trouble, and they didn’t want to fight a small battle either. I wondered if this was a standard practice on their part — refusing a legitimate reimbursement if the amount is too small for the policy holder to wage a legal war.
Another incident taught me that it might well be. A family friend of ours passed away a few years ago. His widow knew that he, being the prudent and caring soul he was, had some life insurance policies, but could not find the papers. So she called the two major insurance companies here and made inquiries using his national identification number. Both companies expressed their condolences to the widow, but regretted that the late husband had no policy with them. Never heard of him, in fact. A few days later, while going through his papers, she found the policies with the same two companies. She called again, and the reply was, “Oh yeah, of course. Sorry, it was an oversight.” If it was just one company, it might have been an oversight. Is it again part of the corporate policy to discourage policy payouts if at all possible? Uninsured until proven otherwise?
If you have had similar experiences with insurance companies, why not leave your story as a comment below?
Autism and Genius
Most things in life are distributed normally, which means they all show a bell curve when quantified using a sensible measure. For instance, the marks scored by a large enough number of students has a normal distribution, with very few scoring close to zero or close to 100%, and most bunching around the class average. This distribution is the basis for letter grading. Of course, this assumes a sensible test — if the test is too easy (like a primary school test given to university students), everybody would score close to 100% and there would be no bell curve, nor any reasonable way of letter-grading the results.
If we could sensibly quantify traits like intelligence, insanity, autism, athleticism, musical aptitude etc, they should all form normal Gaussian distributions. Where you find yourself on the curve is a matter of luck. If you are lucky, you fall on the right side of the distribution close to the tail, and if you are unlucky, you would find yourself near the wrong end. But this statement is a bit too simplistic. Nothing in life is quite that straight-forward. The various distributions have strange correlations. Even in the absence of correlations, purely mathematical considerations will indicate that the likelihood of finding yourself in the right end of multiple desirable traits is slim. That is to say, if you are in the top 0.1% of your cohort academically, and in terms of your looks, and in athleticism, you are already one in a billion — which is why you don’t find many strikingly handsome theoretical physicists who are also ranked tennis players.
The recent world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, is also a fashion model, which is news precisely because it is the exception that proves the rule. By the way, I just figured out what that mysterious expression “exception that proves the rule” actually meant — something looks like an exception only because as a general rule, it doesn’t exist or happen, which proves that there is a rule.
Getting back to our theme, in addition to the minuscule probability for genius as prescribed by mathematics, we also find correlations between genius and behavioral pathologies like insanity and autism. A genius brain is probably wired differently. Anything different from the norm is also, well, abnormal. Behavior abnormal when judged against the society’s rules is the definition of insanity. So there is a only a fine line separating insanity from true genius, I believe. The personal lives of many geniuses point to this conclusion. Einstein had strange personal relationships, and a son who was clinically insane. Many geniuses actually ended up in the looney bin. And some afflicted with autism show astonishing gifts like photographic memory, mathematical prowess etc. Take for instance, the case of autistic savants. Or consider cases like Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory, who is only slightly better than (or different from) the Rain Man.
I believe the reason for the correlation is the fact that the same slight abnormalities in the brain can often manifest themselves as talents or genius on the positive side, or as questionable gifts on the negative side. I guess my message is that anybody away from the average in any distribution, be it brilliance or insanity, should take it with neither pride nor rancor. It is merely a statistical fluctuation. I know this post won’t ease the pain of those who are afflicted on the negative side, or eliminate the arrogance of the ones on the positive side. But here’s hoping that it will at least diminish the intensity of those feelings…
Photo by Arturo de Albornoz 
Pride and Pretention
What has been of intense personal satisfaction for me was my “discovery” related to GRBs and radio sources alluded to earlier. Strangely, it is also the origin of most of things that I’m not proud of. You see, when you feel that you have found the purpose of your life, it is great. When you feel that you have achieved the purpose, it is greater still. But then comes the question — now what? Life in some sense ends with the perceived attainment of the professed goals. A life without goals is a clearly a life without much motivation. It is a journey past its destination. As many before me have discovered, it is the journey toward an unknown destination that drives us. The journey’s end, the arrival, is troublesome, because it is death. With the honest conviction of this attainment of the goals then comes the disturbing feeling that life is over. Now there are only rituals left to perform. As a deep-seated, ingrained notion, this conviction of mine has led to personality traits that I regret. It has led to a level of detachment in everyday situations where detachment was perhaps not warranted, and a certain recklessness in choices where a more mature consideration was perhaps indicated.
The recklessness led to many strange career choices. In fact, I feel as though I lived many different lives in my time. In most roles I attempted, I managed to move near the top of the field. As an undergrad, I got into the most prestigious university in India. As a scientist later on, I worked with the best at that Mecca of physics, CERN. As a writer, I had the rare privilege of invited book commissions and regular column requests. During my short foray into quantitative finance, I am quite happy with my sojourn in banking, despite my ethical misgivings about it. Even as a blogger and a hobby programmer, I had quite a bit success. Now, as the hour to bow out draws near, I feel as though I have been an actor who had the good fortune of landing several successful roles. As though the successes belonged to the characters, and my own contribution was a modicum of acting talent. I guess that detachment comes of trying too many things. Or is it just the grumbling restlessness in my soul?
Pursuit of Knowledge
What I would like to believe my goal in life to be is the pursuit of knowledge, which is, no doubt, a noble goal to have. It may be only my vanity, but I honestly believe that it was really my goal and purpose. But by itself, the pursuit of knowledge is a useless goal. One could render it useful, for instance, by applying it — to make money, in the final analysis. Or by spreading it, teaching it, which is also a noble calling. But to what end? So that others may apply it, spread it and teach it? In that simple infinite regression lies the futility of all noble pursuits in life.
Futile as it may be, what is infinitely more noble, in my opinion, is to add to the body of our collective knowledge. On that count, I am satisfied with my life’s work. I figured out how certain astrophysical phenomena (like gamma ray bursts and radio jets) work. And I honestly believe that it is new knowledge, and there was an instant a few years ago when I felt if I died then, I would die a happy man for I had achieved my purpose. Liberating as this feeling was, now I wonder — is it enough to add a small bit of knowledge to the stuff we know with a little post-it note saying, “Take it or leave it”? Should I also ensure that whatever I think I found gets accepted and officially “added”? This is indeed a hard question. To want to be officially accepted is also a call for validation and glory. We don’t want any of that, do we? Then again, if the knowledge just dies with me, what is the point? Hard question indeed.
Speaking of goals in life reminds me of this story of a wise man and his brooding friend. The wise man asks, “Why are you so glum? What is it that you want?”
The friend says, “I wish I had a million bucks. That’s what I want.”
“Okay, why do you want a million bucks?”
“Well, then I could buy a nice house.”
“So it is a nice house that you want, not a million bucks. Why do you want that?”
“Then I could invite my friends, and have a nice time with them and family.”
“So you want to have a nice time with your friends and family. Not really a nice house. Why is that?”
Such why questions will soon yield happiness as the final answer, and the ultimate goal, a point at which no wise man can ask, “Why do you want to be happy?”
I do ask that question, at times, but I have to say that the pursuit of happiness (or happyness) does sound like a good candidate for the ultimate goal in life.
Summing Up
Toward the end of his life, Somerset Maugham summed up his “take-aways” in a book aptly titled “The Summing Up.” I also feel an urge to sum up, to take stock of what I have achieved and attempted to achieve. This urge is, of course, a bit silly in my case. For one thing, I clearly achieved nothing compared to Maugham; even considering that he was a lot older when he summed up his stuff and had more time achieve things. Secondly, Maugham could express his take on life, universe and everything much better than I will ever be able to. These drawbacks notwithstanding, I will take a stab at it myself because I have begun to feel the nearness of an arrival — kind of like what you feel in the last hours of a long haul flight. I feel as though whatever I have set out to do, whether I have achieved it or not, is already behind me. Now is probably as good a time as any to ask myself — what is it that I set out to do?
I think my main goal in life was to know things. In the beginning, it was physical things like radios and television. I still remember the thrill of finding the first six volumes of “Basic Radio” in my dad’s book collection, although I had no chance of understanding what they said at that point in time. It was a thrill that took me through my undergrad years. Later on, my focus moved on to more fundamental things like matter, atoms, light, particles, physics etc. Then on to mind and brain, space and time, perception and reality, life and death — issues that are most profound and most important, but paradoxically, least significant. At this point in my life, where I’m taking stock of what I have done, I have to ask myself, was it worth it? Did I do well, or did I do poorly?
Looking back at my life so far now, I have many things to be happy about, and may others that I’m not so proud of. Good news first — I have come a long a way from where I started off. I grew up in a middle-class family in the seventies in India. Indian middle class in the seventies would be poor by any sensible world standards. And poverty was all around me, with classmates dropping out of school to engage in menial child labor like carrying mud and cousins who could not afford one square meal a day. Poverty was not a hypothetical condition afflicting unknown souls in distant lands, but it was a painful and palpable reality all around me, a reality I escaped by blind luck. From there, I managed to claw my way to an upper-middle-class existence in Singapore, which is rich by most global standards. This journey, most of which can be attributed to blind luck in terms of genetic accidents (such as academic intelligence) or other lucky breaks, is an interesting one in its own right. I think I should be able to put a humorous spin on it and blog it up some day. Although it is silly to take credit for accidental glories of this kind, I would be less than honest if I said I wasn’t proud of it.
Where to Go from Here?
We started this long series with a pitch for my book, Principles of Quantitative Development. This series, and the associated eBook, is an expanded version of the non-technical introductory chapters of the book — what are the things we need to keep in mind while designing a trading platform? Why is it important to know the big picture of finance and banking? Hopefully, these posts have given you a taste of it here. If you would keep a copy of the series handy, you can purchase and download the beautifully crafted eBook version.
We went through the structure of the bank from the exotic and structured trading perspective. We talked about the various offices (Front Office, Middle Office and Back Office) and pointed out the career opportunities for quantitative professionals within. The organizational structure of the bank is the apparatus that processes the dynamic lifecycle of trades.
If the structure of the bank is akin to the spatial organization, the lifecycle of the trade is the temporal variation; their relation is like that of the rails and the trains. We spent quite a bit of time on the flow of the trades between the front office and middle office teams, how the trades get approved, processed, monitored, settled and managed. Each of these teams has their own perspective or work paradigm that helps them carry out their tasks efficiently.
Trade Perspectives was the last major topic we touched upon. As we saw, these perspectives are based on the way the various teams of the bank perform their tasks. They form the backdrop of the jargon, and are important if we are to develop a big-picture understanding of the way a bank works. Most quants, especially at junior levels, despise the big picture. They think of it as a distraction from their real work of marrying stochastic calculus to C++. But to a trader, the best model in the world is worthless unless it can be deployed. When we change our narrow, albeit effective, focus on the work at hand to an understanding of our role and value in the organization, we will see the possible points of failure of the systems and processes as well as the opportunities to make a difference. We will then be better placed to take our careers to its full potential.
Other Trade Perspectives
In the previous posts, we saw how various teams view the trading activity in their own work paradigm. The perspective that is most common in the bank is still trade-centric. In this view, trades form the primary objects, which is why all conventional trading systems keep track of them. Put bunch of trades together, you get a portfolio. Put a few portfolios together, you have a book. The whole Global Markets is merely a collection of books. This paradigm has worked well and is probably the best compromise between different possible views. The trade-centric perspective, however, is only a compromise. The activities of the trading floor can be viewed from different angles. Each perspective has its role in how the bank works.
From the viewpoint of traders, the trading activity looks asset-class centric. Typically associated with a particular trading desks based on asset classes, their favorite view cuts across models and products. To traders, all products and models are merely tools to make profit.
IT department views the trading world from a completely different perspective. Theirs is a system-centric view, where the same product using the same model appearing in two different systems is basically two completely different beasts. This view is not particularly appreciated by traders, quants or quant developers.
One view that the whole bank appreciates is the view of the senior management, which is narrowly focussed on the bottom line. The big bosses can prioritise things (whether products, asset classes or systems) in terms of the money they bring to the shareholders. Models and trades are typically not visible from their view from the top — unless, of course, rogue traders lose a lot of money on a particular product or by using a particular model.
When the trade reaches the Market Risk Management, there is a subtle change in the perspective from a trade-level view to a portfolio or book level view. Though mathematically trivial (after all, the difference is only a matter of aggregation), this change has implications in the system design. The trading platform has to maintain a robust hierarchical portfolio structure so that various dicing and slicing as required in the later stages of the trade lifecycle can be handled with natural ease.
When it comes to Finance and their notions of cost centers, the trade is pretty much out of the booking system. Still, they manage trading desks and asset classes cost centers. Any trading platform we design has to provide adequate hooks in the system to respond to their specific requirements as well. Closely related to this view is the perspective of Human Resources, who decide incentives based on performance measured in terms of the bottom lines at cost-center or team levels.
Middle Office
The perspective employed by the Middle Office team is an interesting one. Their work paradigm is that of queues running in a first-in, first-out mode. As shown in the picture below, they think of trades as being part of validation and verification queues. When a new trade is booked, it gets pushed into the validation queue from one end. The Middle Office staff attacks the queue from the other end, accepting or rejecting each entry. The ones deemed good get into a second verification queue. The bad ones are returned to the trading desks for modifications in the trade entries or possible cancellations.
A similar paradigm is employed in dealing with market operations such as fixing rates, generating cash flow etc. Market operations have their own two-stage queues. Note that the whole flow is to be facilitated by the trading platform, which should have the capability to render different views. It presents a queue-based view of the data to the middle office staff, and a report-based view to the Market Risk Management team, for instance, or a trade-centric view to most of the other teams. It is important to each team to have a basic grasp and healthy respect for the work paradigm of the other so that they can communicate efficiently with each other. It is no good ignoring the trade perspectives of the rest of the bank. After all, such trade perspectives evolved naturally out of years and years of trial and error.
Are You Busy?
In the corporate world, all successful people are extremely busy. If your calendar is not filled with back-to-back meetings, you don’t belong in the upper rungs of the corporate ladder. Like most things in the corporate world, this feature has also turned on its head. You are not busy because your successful, you are successful because you can project an aura of being busy.
Something I read on the New York Times blog reminded me of an online resource that clearly told us how to look busy. It asked us to watch out for the innocent-sounding question from your colleagues or boss — what are you up to these days? This question is a precursor to dumping more work on your plate. What we are supposed to do, apparently, is to have a ready-made response to this query. Think of the top three things that you are working on. Rehearse a soundbite on what exactly those pieces of work are, how important they are, and how hard you are working on them. Be as quantitative as possible. For example, say that you are working on a project that will make a difference of so many million dollars, and mention the large number of meetings per week you have to attend to chase up other teams etc. Then, when the query is casually thrown your way, you can effectively parry it and score a point toward your career advancement. You won’t be caught saying silly things like, “Ahem.., not much in the last week,” which would be sure invitation to a busy next week. Seriously, the website actually had templates for the response.
Acting busy actually takes up time, and it is hard work, albeit pointless work. The fact of the matter is that we end up conditioning ourselves to actually believe that we really are busy, the work we are doing is significant and it matters. We have to, for not to do so would be to embrace our hypocrisy. If we can fool ourselves, we have absolution for the sin of hypocrisy at the very least. Besides, fooling others then becomes a lot easier.
Being busy, when honestly believed, is more than a corporate stratagem. It is the validation of our worth at work, and by extension, our existence. The corporate love affair with being busy, therefore, invades our private life as well. We become too busy to listen to our children’s silly stories and pet peeves. We become too busy to do the things than bring about happiness, like hanging out with friends and chilling for no purpose. Everything becomes a heavy purposeful act — watching TV is to relax after a hard day’s work (not because you love the Game of Thrones), a drink is to unwind (not because you are slightly alcoholic and love the taste), playing golf is to be seen and known in the right circles (not to smack the **** out of the little white ball) , even a vacation is a well-earned break to “recharge” ourselves to more busy spells (not so much because you want to spend some quality time with your loved ones). Nothing is pointless. But, by trying not to waste time on pointless activities, we end up with a pointless life.
I think we need to do something pointless on a regular basis. Do you think my blogging is pointless enough? I think so.