Ep. 298: Emanuel Derman Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

My guest today is Emanuel Derman, a South African-born businessman and writer, best known as a quantitative analyst. Derman, who first came to the U.S. at age 21, in 1966, is currently a professor at Columbia University and Director of its program in financial engineering. Until recently he was also the Head of Risk and a partner at KKR Prisma Capital Partners, a fund of funds.

The topics are his books My Life As A Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance and Models Behaving Badly.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

  • Why economics can be an ā€˜incestuousā€™ field
  • Economics as a moral science
  • Why all four of the US investment banks were not allowed to go by the wayside
  • Dermanā€™s background and his PhD in theoretical physics
  • Dermanā€™s early eye-opening experiences at Goldman Sachs
  • Model building, and how Derman was indoctrinated into the world of model building
  • The financial model and science and the physics model and science
  • Short volatility models vs. long volatility models
  • How one estimates risk
  • Models vs. theories
  • Whether Derman finds a certain amount of pushback from others in the academic community

Jump in!

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Iā€™m MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and Iā€™m proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show.

To start? Iā€™d like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journeyā€¦ cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/

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Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!