Finance Like We've Never Seen Before

Quantitative finance: a grind to mostly
everyone, a dance for Peter Muller
(Forbes photo)

Finance like we've never seen before - Peter Muller's PDT Partners hedge fund: [bold added]

During 2015, when many hedge fund managers–from mighty activists like Bill Ackman to noted short-sellers like David Einhorn–lost money, Muller spun the market’s volatility into gold. The largest fund of his three-year-old PDT Partners firm, which oversees $4.5 billion, was up 21.5% net of fees in the first 11 months of 2015.

Peter Muller, polymath:

At Princeton he studied math and played in a jazz band...In 1992 he joined Morgan Stanley in New York as a proprietary trader to see if he could use math and computers to trade himself....Nobody outside the bank knew it, but for a long time Muller was Morgan Stanley’s supersecret weapon, making big contributions to its earnings each year, hidden in the firm’s income statement under “principal transactions.”...Crossword puzzles became an escapist obsession; he even created them for the New York Times....He went on sabbatical, rediscovering his love of music partly by busking in New York subway stations and sojourning in far-off places like Bhutan.

Peter Muller's ceiling won't be set by Wall Street competition, but by the limit of his own desire.