对冲基金经理风云录（四）——D.E Shaw 的学霸&土豪人生

这边简单翻译了一下对传奇对冲基金经理De Shaw 的文章

How a Misfit Group of Computer Geeks and English Majors Transformed Wall Street

计算机爱好者和英语专业人士如何转变华尔街

In the 1980s, a quiet hedge fund located above a Marxist bookstore launched a revolution that would change finance (and give us Amazon).

在20世纪80年代，位于马克思主义者书店上方的一个名不经传的对冲基金发起了一场革命，将改变金融（大名鼎鼎的亚马逊其实是来自这里的）。

In the summer of 1988, the hedge-fund manager Donald Sussman took a call from a former Columbia University computer-science professor wanting advice on his new Wall Street career.

1988年夏天，对冲基金经理唐纳德·苏斯曼接到一位前哥伦比亚大学计算机科学教授的电话，希望就他的新华尔街职业生涯提出建议。

“I’d like to come see you,” David Shaw, then 37 years old, told Sussman. Shaw had grown up in California, receiving a Ph.D. at Stanford University, then moved to New York to teach at Columbia before joining investment bank Morgan Stanley, which had a new secretive trading group that was using computer modeling. A neophyte in the ways of Wall Street, Shaw wanted Sussman, who founded the investment firm Paloma Partners, to look at an offer he had received from Morgan Stanley’s rival, Goldman Sachs.

“我想来看你，”37岁的大卫·肖告诉苏斯曼。 Shaw在加利福尼亚长大，获得博士学位。 在斯坦福大学，然后在加入投资银行摩根士丹利之前，他搬到了纽约，在哥伦比亚大学任教，摩根士丹利有一个新的秘密交易小组正在使用计算机建模。 作为华尔街的新手，Shaw想要创办投资公司Paloma Partners的Sussman看看他从摩根士丹利的竞争对手高盛（Goldman Sachs）那里得到的报价。

Sussman’s career has been built on recognizing and financing hedge-fund talent, but he had never encountered anyone like David Shaw. The cerebral computer scientist would go on to become a pioneer in a revolution in finance that would computerize the industry, turn long-standing practices on their head, and replace a culture of tough-guy traders with brainy eccentrics — not just math and science geeks, but musicians and writers — wearing jeans and T-shirts.

苏斯曼的职业生涯建立在对冲基金人才的认可和融资基础之上，但他从未遇到像大卫肖这样的人。 大脑计算机科学家将继续成为金融革命的先驱，将计算机化行业，转变长期存在的做法，用聪明的怪人取代硬汉交易者的文化 - 不仅仅是数学和科学极客 ，还有穿着牛仔裤和T恤音乐家和作家。

A harbinger of the techies who would storm Wall Street in a decade, this new generation of hedge-fund introverts would replace the profanity-laced trading rooms of the 1980s with quiet libraries of algorithmic research in every corner of the markets. They would also launch an early email system and look into the prospect of online retailing, leading one of Shaw’s most ambitious employees to take the idea and run with it. Yes, the seeds of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon were planted at a New York City hedge fund.

这十几年来新一代对冲基金内向的技术人员将成为风暴华尔街风暴的先驱，它将取代20世纪80年代亵渎神灵的交易室，在市场的每个角落都安静地进行算法研究。 他们还将推出早期的电子邮件系统，并展望在线零售业的前景，引领Shaw最雄心勃勃的员工之一接受这一想法并与之共同运营。 是的，Jeff Bezos亚马逊的种子是在纽约市对冲基金种植的。

Thirty years ago, all of that was yet to come. All Shaw told Sussman at the time was, “I think I can use technology to trade securities.”

三十年前，所有这一切都还未到来。 所有Shaw当时告诉Sussman，“我认为我可以利用技术来交易证券。”

Sussman told Shaw the Goldman offer he had received was inadequate. “If you’re confident this idea is going to work, you should come work for me,” Sussman told Shaw. The offer led to three days of sailing in Long Island Sound on Sussman’s 45-foot sloop with the financier, Shaw, and his partner, Peter Laventhol. The two men —without disclosing many details — “convinced me they believed they could generate models that would identify portfolios that would be market-neutral and able to outperform others,” Sussman remembers. In lay terms, the strategy would make a lot of money without taking much risk.

苏斯曼告诉肖，他收到的高盛报价不足。 “如果你有信心这个想法会起作用，你应该为我工作，”苏斯曼告诉肖。 这项提议导致在Sussman的45英尺单桅帆船上与Longta Sound一起航行三天，金融家Shaw和他的搭档Peter Laventhol。 这两个人 - 没有披露许多细节 - “说服我，他们相信他们可以生成能够识别市场中立且能够超越他人的投资组合的模型，”Sussman回忆道。 用非专业术语来说，该策略可以赚很多钱而不会冒很大的风险。

Hedge funds were still fairly primitive, and while they were already using mathematical formulas to capture small price disparities in such esoteric instruments as convertible bonds — then a dominant hedge-fund strategy — Shaw was planning to take the math to a whole new level.

对冲基金仍然相当原始，虽然他们已经使用数学公式来捕捉诸如可转换债券等深奥工具中的小价格差异 - 然后是主导的对冲基金策略 - Shaw计划将数学提升到一个全新的水平。

Paloma Partners agreed to invest $30 million with D.E. Shaw. Since then, the company has grown into an estimated $47 billion firm, earning its investors more than $25 billion — as of the end of 2016, tied for the third biggest haul ever. It has made millionaires out of scores of employees and a multibillionaire out of Shaw, who stepped back in 2001 from day-to-day operation of the firm to start D.E. Shaw Research, which conducts computational biochemistry research in an effort to help cure cancer and other diseases. Shaw is estimated by Forbes to be worth $5.5 billion, and remains as elusive as ever: He declined to speak to New York for this article.

Paloma Partners同意向D.E.投资3000万美元，从那时起，该公司已经发展成为一家估计价值470亿美元的公司，其投资收入超过250亿美元 - 截至2016年底，该公司并列第三大股票。 它已经让Shaw中的百万富翁成为了数百名员工和一位亿万富翁，他们在2001年从公司的日常运营中退出，开始D.E. Shaw Research，负责计算生物化学研究，以帮助治愈癌症和其他疾病。 福布斯估计Shaw价值55亿美元，并且仍然像以前一样难以捉摸：他拒绝与纽约谈论这篇文章。

Meanwhile, the quantitative revolution D.E. Shaw helped spawn has become the biggest trend in hedge funds today, capturing some $500 billion of the industry’s more than $3 trillion in assets and dominating the top tier. Seven out of the top ten largest funds are considered “quants,” including D.E. Shaw itself. One of those seven quants, Two Sigma, was started by D.E. Shaw veterans. But the changes D.E. Shaw wrought haven’t just been felt in hedge funds. Shaw spit out orders accounting for an estimated 2 percent of the trading volume of the New York Stock Exchange in its early years, and thanks to it and other emerging quants, the NYSE was forced to automate. By the end of the 1990s, electronic stock exchanges were driving trading prices down, and by 2001, stocks began to be traded in penny increments, instead of eighths. These changes made it cheaper and easier for all investors to get into the game, leading to an explosion in trading volume.

同时，DEshaw所促成的量化技术革命使得量化技术已成为当今对冲基金的最大趋势，占据了该行业超过3亿亿美元的资产并占据顶级资产的约5000亿美元。 十大基金中有七只被认为是“量化基金”，包括D.E. 肖本身。 D.E.启动了七个量化基金之一，TWO SIGMA Capital 皆是从DE SHAW出来的老兵所创立的。 这些变化不仅仅只存在于D.E. 其他对冲基金也感觉到了。 Shaw吐出的订单约占纽约证券交易所早期交易量的2％，由于它和其他新兴数据，纽约证券交易所被迫实现自动化。 到20世纪90年代末，电子证券交易所推动交易价格下跌，到2001年，股票开始以便士增量交易，而不是八分之一。 这些变化使所有投资者进入游戏更便宜，更容易，导致交易量激增。

From the beginning, D.E. Shaw was a quirky enterprise, even for a hedge fund. The first office was far from Wall Street, in a loftlike space above Revolution Books, a communist bookstore on 16th Street, in what was then a still fairly seedy Union Square. The office, about 1,200 square feet, was bare, with freshly painted walls and a tin ceiling. But it boasted two Sun Microsystem computers — the fastest, most sophisticated computers then in vogue on Wall Street. “He needed Ferraris; we bought him Ferraris,” says Sussman.

从一开始，D.E。 即使是对冲基金，肖也是一个古怪的企业。 第一个办公室远离华尔街，位于第16街上的共产主义书店Revolution Books上方的一个阁楼式空间中，当时还是一个相当肮脏的联合广场。 办公室面积约1,200平方英尺，裸露，墙壁涂有彩色天花板。 但它拥有两台Sun Microsystem计算机 - 当时在华尔街流行的最快，最复杂的计算机。 “他需要法拉利; 我们给他买了法拉利，“苏斯曼说。

As Shaw sought to build his newfangled firm, he didn’t want to hire people steeped in Wall Street’s ways. Likewise, those who joined D.E. Shaw typically disdained the notion of working on the Street. “I thought to myself, No way,” says Lou Salkind, remembering a call he received from Shaw in the summer of 1988 asking him if he would be interested in joining his start-up. Salkind was finishing his Ph.D. in computer science at New York University and on the hunt for a job, but Wall Street turned him off. “The year before, I’d been recruited by a few firms on Wall Street. I was skeptical I would like anything in finance.”

由于Shaw试图建立他的新公司，他不想雇佣沉浸在华尔街的人。 同样，那些加入D.E. 肖通常蔑视在街上工作的想法。 “我心里想，没办法，”Lou Salkind说，记得1988年夏天收到Shaw的一个电话，询问他是否有兴趣加入他的初创公司。 Salkind正在完成他的博士学位。 在纽约大学的计算机科学和寻找工作，但华尔街拒绝了他。 “前一年，我被华尔街的几家公司聘用。 我对财务方面的任何想法持怀疑态度。“

Lacking any other job offers, he agreed to meet with Shaw. After all, his hedge fund’s office was about ten blocks away from NYU. The two men went to lunch at nearby Union Square Cafe, where they got to talking about gambling, one of Salkind’s passions. Born in New York City, Salkind had learned to count cards at an early age and developed a horse-betting system at age 13. He had no idea such mathematical skills would come in handy at a hedge fund. “I had a blast,” he recalls.

由于缺乏任何其他工作机会，他同意与肖会面。 毕竟，他的对冲基金办公室距离纽约大学约十个街区。 这两个人在附近的联合广场咖啡馆吃午餐，在那里他们谈论赌博，这是Salkind的激情之一。 Salkind出生于纽约市，他从小就学会了数卡，并在13岁时开发了马匹投注系统。他不知道这样的数学技能会在对冲基金中派上用场。 “我爆炸了，”他回忆道。

When they returned to the office, Shaw began laying out his vision. “What I want to build here is a company at the intersection of technology and finance,” he told Salkind. As with Sussman, Shaw wouldn’t tell Salkind much more than that, but he did speculate that his firm might be able to replace Wall Street market makers: “They prepare to buy at the bid, hold, and sell at a higher price. The difference is what you try to capture. We could do a lot of this stuff automatically with computers,” he told the fellow computer scientist.

当他们回到办公室时，Shaw开始展示他的愿景。 “我想在这里建立的是一家技术与金融交叉的公司，”他告诉Salkind。 和Sussman一样，Shaw不会告诉Salkind更多，但他确实推测他的公司可以取代华尔街做市商：“他们准备买入，持有，以更高的价格出售。 不同之处在于您尝试捕获的内容。 我们可以通过计算机自动完成很多这样的工作，“他告诉计算机科学家同事。

“Oh, you’re like a bookie. That’s the vig,” said Salkind, who was immediately sold on the job. Salkind, who retired in 2014, became one of the first employees of D.E. Shaw.

“哦，你就像一个赌徒。 那是一种强烈的态度，“Salkind说，他立即在工作中被出售。 Salkind于2014年退休，成为D.E.的首批员工之一。。

In the hedge fund’s early days, Sussman would visit the office weekly. “Once they started trading, they started making money out of the box,” he remembers. “These were very serious folks. I used to go and sit next to them watching them trade. They didn’t miss a goddamn thing,” he recalls. “The atmosphere of the place was unlike any other investment firm. It was like going into the research room in the Library of Congress.”

在对冲基金的早期阶段，Sussman将每周访问该办公室。 “一旦他们开始交易，他们立马就开始赚钱了，”他回忆道。 “这些都是非常认真的人。 我曾经坐在他们旁边看着他们交易。 他们没有错过一个该死的东西，“他回忆道。 “这个地方的气氛与其他投资公司不同。 这就像进入国会图书馆的研究室。“

In 1990, Anne Dinning, another NYU computer-science Ph.D. who knew Salkind from his days there, struck up a conversation with Shaw at a party at Salkind’s home. “I didn’t even know what a hedge fund was,” she recalls, but agreed to interview for a job at Shaw “as a lark,” and ended up joining, despite her initial desire to become an academic.

1990年，Anne Dinning，另一位纽约大学计算机科学博士。 谁知道Salkind在那里的日子，在Salkind家的一个聚会上与Shaw进行了一次对话。 “我甚至不知道什么是对冲基金，”她回忆说，但同意接受Shaw的工作采访“作为一个百灵鸟”，并最终加入，尽管她最初想成为一名学者。

“My first job was to work on some forecast of Japanese equities,” she says. Dinning didn’t have to know anything about the companies or the Japanese stock market. The computer would figure it all out. In the early days, she would run 24-hour simulations, waking up every six hours in the night to check on their progress. Once the algorithms were ready for live trading, “I’d look at the P&L every day and see if it’s doing what I thought it would. It was like an experiment. And I could see the immediate results,” says Dinning. As the firm expanded, Dinning ended up running both the London and Tokyo offices of D.E. Shaw, and both she and Salkind became members of an unorthodox six-person executive committee that ran the firm in a surprisingly effective consensus manner after Shaw stepped back from its day-to-day management. (He is still involved in strategic decisions.)

“我的第一份工作是研究日本股市的一些预测，”她说。 Dinning对公司或日本股市一无所知。 电脑会全力以赴。 在早期，她将进行24小时模拟，每晚六小时醒来检查他们的进展。 一旦算法准备好进行实时交易，“我每天都会查看损益表，看看它是否按照我的想法行事。 这就像一个实验。 我可以看到直接的结果，“丁宁说。 随着公司的扩大，Dinning最终在D.E.的伦敦和东京办事处运营。 Shaw，她和Salkind都成为了一个非正统的六人执行委员会成员，在Shaw退出日常管理之后，以一种令人惊讶的有效共识方式管理公司。 （他仍然参与战略决策。）

While D.E. Shaw was minting money, David Shaw’s vision didn’t stop with creating a quantitative hedge fund. Technology, he knew, had the capacity to transform our everyday lives. As an academic, Shaw had already used the Arpanet, the precursor to the internet, to communicate with other scientists. That helped inspire one of the first free internet-based email systems, Juno. With equity capital from D.E. Shaw, the service launched in 1996, went public, and eventually merged with a competitor.

而D.E. Shaw正在筹集资金，David Shaw的愿景并没有停止创建一个量化对冲基金。 他知道，科技有能力改变我们的日常生活。 作为一名学者，Shaw已经使用了互联网的前身Arpanet与其他科学家进行交流。 这有助于激发首批免费的基于互联网的电子邮件系统之一Juno。 来自D.E.的股权资本 Shaw，1996年推出的服务，上市，并最终与竞争对手合并。

Free email was only one of Shaw’s early initiatives, explains Charles Ardai, who joined Shaw in 1991 with a degree in English (specifically, British Romantic poetry) from Columbia, one of the first of many unconventional hires who didn’t have a background in the hard sciences.

免费电子邮件只是Shaw早期举措中的一个，Charles Ardai解释说，他于1991年加入Shaw，获得哥伦比亚大学的英语学位（特别是英国浪漫主义诗歌），这是许多没有背景的非常规雇员之一。 坚硬的科学。

“He went to one of my co-workers and said, ‘I think people will buy things on the internet. They’re going to shop on the internet. What’s more, they’re not just going to shop.’ This, I swear to you, is what David said: ‘Not only will people shop, but when they buy something — let’s say they buy a pipe for watering their garden — they’re going to try a pipe, and they’re going to say, this pipe is good, or this pipe is bad, and they’re going to post reviews, and other people will see them and pick the right instead of the wrong pipe, because somebody else told them, I like this pipe. I don’t like that pipe.’”

“他去了我的一位同事说：'我认为人们会在互联网上买东西。 他们要去网上购物。 更重要的是，他们不只是去购物。“我向你发誓，这就是大卫所说的：'不仅人们会购物，而且当他们买东西时 - 让我们说他们买了一根管子给他们的花园浇水 - 他们 我要去尝试一个烟斗，他们会说，这个烟斗很好，或者这个烟斗坏了，他们会发表评论，而其他人会看到它们并选择正确的而不是错误的 管道，因为有人告诉他们，我喜欢这个管子。 我不喜欢那个烟斗。'“

Jeff Bezos, who had joined in 1990, was in charge of the online retailing project at D.E. Shaw. He became so enthused about the possibilities that he asked Shaw if he could take the idea and run with it on his own. Shaw agreed, and Amazon was soon born. (Shaw didn’t take a stake in the now-$620 billion company.)

Jeff Bezos于1990年加入，负责D.E.的在线零售项目。肖。 他对这家对冲基金隐藏的巨大可能性感到兴奋，他问Shaw是否可以接受这个想法并自己运行。 肖同意了，亚马逊很快就出生了。 （Shaw没有收购现在这家价值6200亿美元的公司。）

Upon graduating from Columbia, Ardai says he had been so surprised to receive a letter from Shaw asking him to apply for a job that he thought “it must be a scam.” Soon after the 22-year-old joined, he was tasked with setting up Shaw’s recruiting department. “We’ve filled the company with everything from a chess master, to published writers, to stand-up comedians — people who really excel in one field or another — we had an Olympic-caliber fencer, and at one point we had a demolitions expert,” he says. One of D.E. Shaw’s best traders had tattoos all over his arms and couldn’t get hired anywhere on Wall Street. Another was a trombone player who eventually left to create a music program in the Bronx. (Ardai also has other interests; he is the founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, a line of pulp-style paperback crime novels.)

从哥伦比亚大学毕业后，Ardai说他很惊讶收到Shaw的一封信，要求他申请一份他认为“一定是骗局的工作。”这位22岁的孩子加入后不久，他的任务是 成立肖的招聘部门。 “我们已经为公司提供了从国际象棋大师，出版作家到脱口秀喜剧演员 - 在一个或另一个领域真正擅长的人 - 我们有一个奥林匹克级别的击剑手，并且有一次我们有一个强拆 专家，“他说。 D.E.之一 肖的最好的交易者手臂上都纹身，无法在华尔街的任何地方受雇。 另一个是长号演奏者，他最终离开了在布朗克斯创作音乐节目。 （Ardai还有其他兴趣;他是Hard Case Crime的创始人和编辑，这是一系列纸浆式平装犯罪小说。）

D.E. Shaw’s hiring process may have a far-flung reach, but by no means is it egalitarian. In fact, its recruiting letters once started with an assertion that the firm is “unapologetically elitist.” Once eyebrow-raising, the hedge fund’s hiring practices are no longer abnormal, as they have been adopted by giant tech firms like Google, and of course, Amazon, which even uses the same grading system as D.E. Shaw when interviewing candidates.

D.E. Shaw的招聘流程可能涉及范围广泛，但绝不是平等主义。 事实上，它的招聘信件曾经开始时声称该公司“毫无歉意地是精英主义者。”一旦抬头，对冲基金的招聘行为不再异常，因为它们已被谷歌等大型科技公司采用，当然 ，亚马逊，甚至使用与DE相同的评分系统 Shaw在面试候选人时。

The casual dress code embraced by D.E. Shaw has also become de rigueur at tech giants. Though viewed as shocking in Shaw’s early years, such attire is also common at many New York hedge funds today. “One of the goals at D.E. Shaw has always been ‘let’s remove all of the unnecessary constraints,’ for example, why require people to wear neckties?” explains Ardai. The crew at D.E. Shaw was so disheveled that, according to Shaw lore, one disgusted white-shoe law firm moved out of a midtown office tower that the hedge fund occupied — in protest. These days, David Shaw, whose research project is housed across the street from the hedge fund, is often seen wearing a black T-shirt and cargo shorts — even in the middle of winter.

D.E.拥抱的休闲着装规范 Shaw也成为科技巨头的必需品。 虽然在肖的早年被视为令人震惊，但这种服装在今天的许多纽约对冲基金中也很常见。 “D.E.的目标之一 Shaw一直都是'让我们消除所有不必要的限制'，例如，为什么要求人们穿领带呢？“Ardai解释道。 D.E.的工作人员 根据Shaw的说法，Shaw是如此凌乱，一家厌恶的白鞋律师事务所搬出了对冲基金占据的市中心办公大楼 - 抗议。 如今，David Shaw的研究项目位于对冲基金的街对面，经常看到穿着黑色T恤和货物短裤 - 即使在冬季中期。

For all of its attempts at modesty, D.E. Shaw has come a ways from its years above a communist bookstore. With more than 1,000 employees, in 2010 the firm moved into new offices at 1166 Sixth Avenue (its fourth New York City home) whose austere reception area has a ceiling and walls covered with screens designed to look like computer punch cards.

对于所有谦虚的尝试，D.E。 肖已经走过了一个远离共产主义书店的道路。 该公司拥有1000多名员工，于2010年迁入位于第六大道1166号（纽约市第四大厦）的新办公室，其严峻的接待区设有天花板，墙壁上覆盖着看起来像电脑打卡的屏幕。

In 2015, former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, a longtime investor in D.E. Shaw’s hedge funds, took a 20 percent stake in the firm, buying out bankrupt Lehman Brothers’ earlier investment. These days, there’s so much money chasing quants that the earlier strategy of betting on inefficiencies in public equity markets has become less profitable. Innovator D.E. Shaw has moved from its beginnings in equity arbitrage into other arenas like distressed debt and emerging markets, where it uses its quantitative techniques to help give it an edge while relying on humans, not computer models, to make trading decisions.

2015年，前谷歌执行主席埃里克施密特（Eric Schmidt）是D.E.的长期投资者。 Shaw的对冲基金持有该公司20％的股份，收购破产的雷曼兄弟此前的投资。 如今，追逐数量的资金如此之多，以至于早期投资公共股票市场效率低下的策略已经变得不那么有利可图了。 创新者D.E. Shaw已经从股权套利的起点转移到其他领域，如不良债务和新兴市场，在这些领域，它利用其定量技术帮助赋予其优势，同时依靠人而不是计算机模型做出交易决策。

As the firm gets ready to celebrate its 30th anniversary, David Shaw has not disappointed his first investor, Donald Sussman, whose firm eventually had hundreds of millions of dollars invested with D.E. Shaw. “I never doubted him for a minute,” he says. “I never envisioned that D.E. Shaw would be $47 billion, but I did envision how David would change the world of finance.”

随着公司准备庆祝其成立30周年，David Shaw并没有让他的第一个投资人Donald Sussman失望，他的公司最终投资了数亿美元的D.E.肖。 “我从不怀疑他一分钟，”他说。 “我从没想过D.E. 肖将是470亿美元，但我确实想到大卫将如何改变金融世界。“