GUEST COMMENT: One French author's minor quant fantasy
I am thirty-seven years' old. I have 40 million euros in a Cayman Islands account. I am a Brownian math junkie. A guy paid to flirt with fractals and cover-up risk.
I bet on the Asian collapse, surfed on the internet bubble. In 2008 I watched the dazed and reeling Merrill Lynch employees become servants of the state. I am in charge of quantitative trading at Crédit Général Bank. I write quantitative analysis programs, models with fifty variables.
Thirty guys line up miles of code for me, looking for Alpha, the perfect equation. I press enter and launch software programs onto the financial markets. Like an Aladdin's magic lamp, it spews forth two figure ratios. I don't even have to pick up the phone. Algorithms calculate the optimal position in real time, computers send orders within a nanosecond. Today, 70% of daily transactions are made using systems like mine. Every single day, the future of the world is negotiated by ultra-intelligent machines. These are the drones of finance.
On the trading floor, while the smooth-cheeked traders slave away on the telephone, I drink green tea while reading The Story of My Life by Casanova. I shoot a cursory glance at the performance curve which develops by itself.
Sometimes I go watch a movie at the UGC theatre in the La Défense district while waiting for the Stock Exchange to close. As soon as a program runs out of steam, I launch another one, straight from the computers of my team of physicists specialized in fluid mechanics. The bank dresses it up in a marketing package and calls the whole thing 'investment products'. The communications department publishes an official report and organizes opulent conferences on the treasures of financial innovation.
Nobody has a clue what I'm doing.
Mathematics and codes have given us power. Complexity is the most potent weapon, the '+' sign the golden rule. The planet is a game of Monopoly, , companies merely reduced to a list of stock exchange symbols and workers the infantrymen of all-powerful capital.
The world works for us but we are never seen. We bankers, we live leveraged, massively in debt.
We bet one, borrow one hundred, earn one thousand. GDP, cash-flow, currencies, we bet on anything and everything. We hardly know how to read a balance sheet. Most of us have never even set foot inside the doors of a company, the ultimate treadmill of the rat-race. We couldn't care less about what they do, the number of people they hire. Finance was invented to make grand projects happen, to raise people out of poverty. These days, we are betting against humanity, an extremely volatile security. Finance causes catastrophes then prospers by re-absorbing them. Our profits are your losses.
Flore Vasseur is an author, consultant, trend spotter and film director. Her last novel, Comment j'ai liquidé le siècle, son
from which this extract was taken, was published in March 2010.
