The top people on Wall Street used to be the jocks: the sports enthusiasts whose idea of a good time outside of work was to play football or go running or (increasingly nowadays) cycle miles and participate in triathlons.
These will not be the people of the future.
As a Bloomberg article on Man Group’s artificial intelligence unit reminds us, the finance of the future will likely have rather different obsessions in their downtime. Like…the internal workings of watches.
This is the case for Anthony Ledford, chief scientist at Man AHL’s Oxford AI lab. When Ledford’s not working with Man’s machine learning specialists, he’s reportedly a horologist. His house in the English countryside is filled with ancient clocks which he has reconstructed in his spare time.
Bloomberg’s article on Man also acts as a reminder of the intense global competition for these roles. One of Ledford’s colleagues is Slavi Marinov. The lab may be in Oxford, but Marinov was drawn from further afield: he’s a Bulgarian computer scientist who previously made software for an education start-up.
Separately, have you ever wanted to encourage your teenage children, nieces or nephews to follow in your footsteps as a financial services professional?
You could always try Stockpile, a broker-dealer with an app that aims to persuade older children and young adults to buy pieces of big-name stocks at retail chains such as Kmart and Office Depot.
The teens in your life are skeptical or apathetic about the app, you say? Tell them in 2015 “That ’70s Show” actor Ashton Kutcher invested in Stockpile.
“I think investing in the stock market will help kids later in life,” Max Shriver, a 10-year-old from Westchester County, New York, told the Wall Street Journal, adding that he thinks more people should begin investing earlier on in life. “Sometimes when adults start investing, they don’t even know what to do.”
Meanwhile:
White House Economic Adviser Gary Cohn said President Trump is still intent on eliminating the carried interest tax break even though it wasn’t specified in his tax framework. (Bloomberg)
Uh, Gary Cohn (who is worth several hundred million dollars) thinks it costs $1000 to buy a new car (or renovate your kitchen) pic.twitter.com/6IwRDgGSCN
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) September 28, 2017
Wall Street bankers are reacting to Trump’s long-awaited tax plan, which is still light on details. (Business Insider)
UBS has hired a leveraged finance veteran who previously worked for rival Bank of America Merrill Lynch to a senior role in London. (Private Equity News)
Ex-BAML and Deutsche banker Bruce MacKenzie is joining UBS as a managing director in its leveraged capital markets team covering EMEA. (Financial News)
Deutsche Bank has hired Maurits Duynstee, the head of Dutch wholesale banking at ING, to join its mergers and acquisitions team in the Benelux region. (New York Times)
Societe Generale has appointed former air force general Antoine Creux as its chief security officer. (Reuters)
Big investment banks with their European headquarters in London are forging ahead with plans to create new trading hubs elsewhere in the region in preparation for Brexit despite the U.K.’s pledge to secure a two-year transition period after March 2019. (Bloomberg)
U.S. regulators plan to modify bank capital rules affecting commercial real-estate loans, mortgage-servicing rights and other areas in response to industry concerns. (WSJ)
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he plans to cut back on his use of government aircraft. (WSJ)
The equity analysts at Macquarie are siding with Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman’s centrist position on Bitcoin and disagree with J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s comparing the cryptocurrency to the tulip bubble. (Business Insider)
Gorman also said that clients will still want human relationships. (Financial News)
That said, Well Fargo analysts are building an AI algorithm that could take their jobs. (Bloomberg)
Traders in this one country have an excuse to take the rest of year off. (Bloomberg)
Whitney Tilson is closing his hedge fund, the latest high-profile investor to close shop amid an extended period of disappointing returns for the industry. (WSJ)
Michael Oved, who helped Virtu Financial become the most consistently profitable market-maker in the history of electronic trading, has his sights set on digital currency exchanges. (Bloomberg)
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Photo credit: Wheels by Apionid is licensed under CC BY 2.0.