Tag Archives: Corporate Life

Structure of a Bank

The trading arm of a bank consists of three so-called “offices” — the Front Office, the Middle Office and the Back Office. The Front Office (which may go by the names Global Treasury, Global Markets etc.) is the customer facing part. It houses the loud and strong-willed traders, extremely articulate economists, personable sales staff along with some mathematicians with thick glasses and bulging foreheads. The Front Office is considered the profit-making part of the trading activity — it is a profit center. All other teams in the other two offices are cost centers, which is a fact that is well reflected in the compensation structure.

Trading Platform

The Middle Office faces the Front Office, not the external world. They busy themselves with trade validation, lifecycle management, risk calculation, monitoring, limits enforcements etc. The Back Office is far removed from the Front (and from the sphere of influence of a quant or a quantitative developer). They take care of vitally important aspects of trading — namely settlements, taking and paying money. They also control the numbers that appear in the very visible annual reports.

By the way, the naming of the offices has nothing to do with their geographic location — a fact I learned early in my banking career about seven years ago when my boss wanted to take me to meet someone in the Back Office. I couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t actually leading me to the back of the building, I am embarrassed to admit.

Trading Platform

All the Offices are supported by multiple departments in the bank, most notably the Information Technology (which may go by the names Group Technology or any other transmogrificaiton of it). Also supporting everything happening in a bank (or in any corporate body, for that matter) would be Human Resources, Finance etc.

Before we conclude this post, we have to highlight a couple of caveats. The structure described above is by no means the whole bank. It is only the trading arm of the investment banking side of a modern bank. This part happens to be the one most relevant to quantitative developers. Even in this limited remit, the details of the structure (which we will get to in the subsequent posts) are not cast in stone. Each bank may have its own partitions, naming conventions and organizational and hierarchical structures around the various offices. Despite such differences, the static topology of the various offices haas enough commonality that we can talk about it general terms. As we will explore how the omnipresent trading platform mediates almost all interactions among these offices and their teams in the subsequent posts, we will get into more details of the structure.

Trading Platform

A trading platform is a program that enables the front office traders to price and book trades, the middle office professionals to manage the trade lifecycle and risk, and the back office staff to settle them. This definition contains a lot of jargon: front/middle/back offices, booking a trade, trade lifecycle, risk management, settlement etc. Don’t worry, we will go through the lingo in great detail in the subsequent posts. Some of it will become clear in this post.

Trading Platform

First, let’s be clear about what we mean by a trading platform. It is a piece of software that answers to a set of requirements coming from the business side as well as from the software architecture perspective. From the business side, the trading platform acts like the repository of the pricing models coming from the in-house quants. Since most of these models would not be ready when the system goes live, we should be able to add models on the fly. In other words, the trading platform should be incrementally deployable. It should also have built-in sockets to receive and archive market data feeds from multiple providers. In addition to persisting the market data, the trading platform should have a database backend with a robust schema to persist the trade data. It should be able to support regular processes like daily marking-to-market of the trades, flagging fixings and cash-flow requests etc. As with all financial programs, the trading platform should be able to provide indelible audit-trails, coupled with a highly granular access control mechanism. These security and authentication features have become even more relevant in light of the high-profile rogue trader instances of last decade.

All these high-level business requirements translate to architectural choices in the program. The design of the trading platform calls for a higher level of code maintainability than is obvious in normal software engineering, because the banking field suffers from a rather large personnel attrition rate. In order to minimize the key-person risk, we should insist on detailed documentation in addition to sound development practices. The scalability requirement of a trading platform is also more stringent than is common in normal programs. The volume of trades can jump from a handful to hundreds of thousands in a matter of weeks when the system goes live. Similar to that kind of scalability is another requirement — the ability to incrementally add modules to roll out the pricing models originating from the mathematicians of the bank, which calls for a very careful design. The robustness of the system will also have to the very high even at single transaction level. We have to ensure transactional integrity (no half-booked trades, for instance), and zero downtime because, after all, time is money in the bank. The authentication and security mechanisms are to be top-notch. To top it all, the performance has to be top-notch as well. So the design of trading platform is a daunting task from a software architecture perspective.

Why a Trading Platform

The question is not whether a modern bank should have a trading platform. All banks do. In fact, they have multiple trading platforms. The question is not even whether they should attempt to build a trading platform in-house. Again, most modern investment banks do build their own in-house platforms. The question I want to explore here is regarding the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. And to study some of the options when it comes to deciding how deep we want to go in the endeavor of building a trading platform in-house.

The real impetus behind any endeavor in a bank, of course, is money. An in-house trading platform is essential to harness the efforts of the highly paid model quants. In its absence, their mathematical models and implementations will be a confusing mess of prototypes and spreadsheets. A well-designed quant library and a trading platform riding on it can turn them into revenue generators. If the trading platform is built in-house, it offers additional advantages of speediness to respond to transient market conditions. For these reasons, most modern banks decide to invest in at least one in-house trading platform.

How to Get a Trading Platform

Once we decide to build it in-house, we have a slew of choices. First, we can think of extending the existing commercial trading platform. We can ask our vendor to incorporate our models and thus customize the platform. But this option usually doesn’t work out well because it tends to be slow and expensive. Besides, once the modules are developed for us, the vendor might want to sell the system to our competitors as well, unless we are prepared to accept even more expensive terms and conditions. This aspect will pretty much nullify any profit motivations that the bank had to begin with.

Another option is a middle ground of using the vendor’s interfaces (API) to implement our models on the commercial system. Although it might initially look attractive, it’s allure diminishes at closer inspection; once we realize that vendors have no incentive in making it easy for the users to modify the system. If anything, it only increases their support headaches with uninitiated IT managers mucking up the core functionalities. Perhaps for such reasons, vendor APIs tend to be both expensive and incomprehensible. Besides, this route of designing a customized trading platform ends up creating highly-skilled and mobile key persons, with the associated risks.

For ultimate control and flexibility (and for most fun), nothing beats a fully in-house designed trading platform. It can be highly nimble and responsive. But it is also an adventurous and error-prone undertaking. Nonetheless, it is this route we will explore in great detail in my book, and to a lesser degree, in this series of posts.

Agendas

In the dog-eat-dog corporate jungle, there always is a hidden agenda. Always. In writing this series of posts, I have a hidden agenda as well. It is to promote my book – Principles of Quantitative Development. Everything I say here is described in much more detail in the book. And, the book goes into topics that I do not plan to touch upon here – like a review of computing principles for quants, quant developers and people involved in trading and trade lifecycle management. Finally, the book comes with a mini trading platform illustrating many of the principles described.

Hidden Agendas

If these compelling reasons have failed to convince you to fork out fifty or so dollars to order the book from Amazon, consider your own hidden agenda. Why are you reading these posts? You are probably considering a lucrative career as a quantitative professional in a bank. Or, as a junior quant professional, you would like to know more about how the whole thing works. And Principles of Quantitative Development may help you in that quest.

To get back to my point, there always is a hidden agenda, and the associated petty politics. If you cannot play the political game, a bank is not the right place for you. That may sound like bad news to you. Let me give you the good news. Almost everybody is better at politics that they think they are, And almost everybody in the bank, regardless of how high they are, goes about feeling that they are not doing as well as they should, because they don’t play the political game . So don’t worry too much about it even if you fee that you are not good at it — you are probably better than you think you are.

My real point is just that you should be aware of hidden agendas — in day-to-day interactions, corporate memos and announcements etc. For instance, let’s suppose you get a congratulatory email from your big boss about a project you are working on, saying you did an excellent job, it’s going to save or make so many millions of dollars, and everybody is mighty pleased about it. You may also feel mighty pleased about the message, and start thinking of that big break, promotion, bonus, corner office, expense account etc. But it may turn out to be a precursor to letting you go — after all, you did such a wonderful job, and your work here is done!

Topics

Regarding the agenda of these posts, this series of posts will cover the items listed in the picture above. In the next post, we will go through what we call a Trading Platform because that is the arena of Quantitative Development. The next few posts will be on the structure of an investment bank, from the perspective of a quant and a quantitative developer. The structure, in some sense, is the static topology. How trades flow through it will be the subsequent few posts, which will be the dynamic evolution of a trade. As ia trade moves from one department to another in a bank, the players involved use their own work paradigms and perspectives to view and deal with it. It is important to understand these perspectives so that a quant developer can understand and appreciate the myriads of requirements thrown at him. After all, his product — the trading platform — mediates everything.

In order to give you more of a flavor for the workings of a bank, the whole series of posts will be peppered with some little tidbits of information that may read like newspaper columns — after all, I started my writing career as a columnist. In my book, these tidbits are called the BIG PICTURE.

Off the Beaten Track

Recently, I gave an invited lecture to the Master of Financial Engineering students at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. I thought I would make a series of blog posts out of my talk with the belief that there is a wider audience out there who would like to know how an investment bank (or, more precisely, the structured and exotic products trading side of a bank) works.

Principles of Quantitative Development

First things first. I work for Standard Chartered Bank, Singapore. But the views expressed here in the talk and in this series of posts are my own. They are not influenced by my employer’s policies or client relationships. They are not meant to be any kind of investment or career advice. This disclaimer is a legal necessity before I can say anything related to banking and finance.

Off the Beaten Track

Since the talk was originally given to MFE students, who are expected to be pretty well-versed in the mathematics of quantitative finance, and possibly of computing as well, I tried to tell you something different. In any case, all the mathematics and computing stuff is something you can pick up from any number of standard text books. The stuff I’m about to share with you is something you will learn from only a few books, or by working in a bank for a while. That brings me to my hidden agenda. (Well, not so-hidden after this introduction.) And to the first moral of this lecture — there always is a hidden agenda in the corporate jungle. I will have more to say about it in the next post.

Since this series of posts is not quite on quantitative finance, nor on computing, it is a bit off the beaten track. Hope you enjoy it. In any case, you will develop and appreciation for the “Big Picture”. A few years ago, I published a well received article in the Wilmott Magazine on the same theme, and the positive feedback I received from it was the inspiration to write my book.

In this talk, and in my book, I lay out the foundations of Quantitative Development. Quantitative Developers (who tend to be computer science professionals) are different from Quants (who tend to be mathematicians). Quants tend to develop pricing models or other mathematical tools for the rest of the banks to use, and make them available in the form of prototype programs, or the so-called quant libraries. Quantitative developers make them available in existing, familiar systems (“productionize” them, to use the horrible jargon) so that the rainmakers of the bank can bring in profits. In that sense, their role in the bank is sandwiched between the model quants and the traders, from a functional perspective. If you don’t like that perspective, and would like to have a more abstract, mathematical sort of view, you can think of quantitative development as being in between pricing models and systems (which we will call Trading Platforms very soon). Or from a corporate hierarchy perspective, the job of quantitative developers falls in between the front office and the information technology division, so much so that they can actually be integrated with either one of them.

Was Yours, Now Mine

I feel I have lived through an era of great changes. The pace of change can seem accelerated if you travel or emigrate because various geographical regions act as different slices in time. I have had the benefit (or the misfortune) of multiple emigrations. With that, coupled with my advancing years, I feel as though I have seen a lot. Most of what I have seen fills me with a foreboding of gloom and doom. Perhaps it is merely the pessimism characteristic of an unduly cynical mind, or perhaps it is the true decay of our global ethical standards.

On the positive side, the pace of change is indeed fast and furious. This is the kind of change you like — you know, vinyl to spool tape to cassette to MP3 to iPod kind. Or the land-line to satellite to cell to Skype to Twitter kind. However, along with this positive and obvious track of changes, there is an insidiously slow and troubling track creeping up on us. It is n this context that I want to reuse the over-used allegory of the frog-in-a-pot.

If you put a frog in hot water, it will jump out of the pot and save its skin. But if you place the frog in cold water, and slowly heat up the pot, it won’t feel the change and boil to death. The slowness of change is deadly. So let me be the frog with delusions of grandeur; allow me to highlight the unhealthy changes accumulating around us. You see, along with the technological miracle that we are living through, there is an economic or financial nightmare that is spreading its tentacles over all aspects of our social and political existence, transfixing everything in place in its vice-like grip. Slowly. Very slowly. Because of this invisible hold on us, with every iPod we buy, we (the middle-class) take a couple of dollars from the very poor and give it to the very rich. We don’t see it that way because some of us make a few cents in the process. The Apple store franchisee makes a few cents, the employee-of-the-month gets a token raise, an apple developer may enjoy a nice vacation, or a senior executive might get a new jet, the economy of the country goes up a notch, NASDAQ (and so everybody’s pension) goes up a tiny fraction — all are happy, right?

Well, there is this little question of the packaging material that may have killed part of a tree somewhere, in Brazil, perhaps, where people don’t know that the trees belong to them. May be a little bit of pollution escaped into the air or a river in China where the locals haven’t realized that these resources are their heirlooms. May be some moderately toxic junk ended up in a landfill in Africa somewhere where they haven’t quite grasped the concept of land ownership. It may have cost a developer in Bangalore or a call-center girl in Manilla an hour or two more than it should because they don’t know that their time is a resource bought low and sold high in markets they don’t see or know of. It is from these distant places and phantom people that we pick up a couple of dollars and pass on to the equally distant corporate coffers and stock markets. We take what is not ours from the unknown owners to feed the avarice of unseen players. And, like Milo Minderbinder would say, everybody has a share. This is the modern capitalism of the corporate era, where we have all become tiny cogs in a giant wheel inexorably rolling on to nowhere in particular, but obliterating much in the process.

The problem with capitalism as an economic ideology is that it is pretty much unopposed now. Only through a conflict of ideology can a balance of some sort emerge. Every conflict, by definition, requires adversaries, at least two of them. And so does an ideological struggle. The struggle is between capitalism and communism (or socialism, I’m not sure of the difference). The former says we should lay off the markets and let greed and selfishness run its course. Well, if you don’t like the sound of “greed and selfishness,” try “ambition and drive.” Associate it with words like freedom and democracy, and this “Laissez-Faire” ideology a la Adam Smith is a winning formula.

Standing in the other corner is the opposing ideology, which says we should control the flow of money and resources, and spread happiness. Unfortunately this ideology got associated with nasty words like totalitarianism, bureaucracy, mass murder, killing fields of Cambodia etc. Little wonder that it lost, save for this economic powerhouse called China. But the victory of China is no consolation for the socialist camp because China did it by redefining socialism or communism to essentially mean capitalism. So the victory of capitalism is, to all intents and purposes, a slam dunk. To the victors belong to spoils of history. And so, the socio-politico-economic ideology of capitalism enjoys the mellifluous association of nice words like liberty, equal opportunity, democracy etc., while communism is a failed experiment relegated to the “also-ran” category of ideologies such as fascism, Nazism and other evil stuff. So the battle between capitalism and the occupy-wall-street movements is pathetically asymmetric.

A battle between two well-matched opponents is nice to watch; say, a match between Djokovic and Federer. On the other hand, a “match” between Federer and me would be exciting only to me — if that. If you are into violent entertainment, a boxing match between two heavy weights would be something interesting to watch. but a brawny boxer beating the living daylights out of a two-year-old would only fill you with revolt and disgust (which is similar to the feeling I had during the ’91 Gulf War).

Don’t worry, I’m not about to defend or try to revive socialism on this blog, because I don’t think a centrally controlled economy works either. What worries me is the fact that capitalism does not have a worthy adversary now. Shouldn’t it worry you as well? Corporate capitalism is beating the living daylights out of everything that one might call decent and human. Should we ignore and learn to love our disgust just because we got a share?

Photo by Byzantine_K cc

Ethics In Business and Leadership

[This post is the speech given by Prof. Surya Sethi at World Forum for Ethics in Business – International Leadership Symposium Monday, April 2, 2012 in Singapore. Reproduced here with permission.]

I have been asked to cover a broad spectrum of issues relating to business regaining trust for sustainability within the context of climate change and the global energy crisis. Importantly, I have been asked to do so in 10 minutes reflecting the efficiency of the city-state we are in.

Let me begin by differentiating between moral and ethical values. Based on what I heard this morning, there appears to be some confusion between morals and ethics. The former define individual character and are based on personal beliefs of right and wrong or good and bad. The latter are essentially standards and codes of conduct, expected in a specific context, from the group an individual belongs to. Ethics typically encompass societal, corporate, national, professional or other similar compacts. Individually, we consider killing as morally wrong but an army killing thousands is considered ethical and is often decorated as an act of bravery for common good.

Business enterprises, today, manned largely by morally upright individuals are collectively killing the planet we share with a ferocity, intensity and speed matching that of war; and getting rewarded for creating unprecedented valuations and competitive supremacy. Consumption for the sake of consumption, growth for the sake of growth, profit for the sake of profit and support for policies and policy makers that uphold all of the foregoing are the ethical values guiding these enterprises.

The anthropogenic damage to the earth’s ecology over the last 60 years exceeds the damage done by humans over their entire history up to 1950. The fine balance between physical, chemical and biological processes that sustain the earth as a single interdependent system has been disturbed. The earth has moved well outside the range of her natural variability exhibited over the previous half a million years in the very least. Abrupt ecological changes with non-linear feedbacks in the earth’s dynamics, leading to catastrophic outcomes, are a real possibility today. Ethics should be price determining and not price determined by markets. Under-pricing natural capital and ignoring concomitant risks is fuelling the consumption boom.

Importantly, the growth, the consumption and the benefits have been concentrated in the privileged few. The top 20% of the world consumes 80% of its output while the bottom 80% lives on the balance 20%. The bottom 20% lives in dire poverty at a consumption of less than $1.25 PPP/day or about 50cents/day in nominal cents in a country such as India which is home to a third of these global unfortunate. Going just by income poverty, the number living below this dire threshold has come down by some 500 million – almost entirely because of a reduction in China. However, the broader multidimensional poverty index that includes parameters such as health, education, gender equality, access, empowerment etc. pushes the share of these destitute people to about 25% of the global population. Importantly, the number of people below the global poverty line of $2 PPP per day consumption remains stubbornly at about 2.5 billion or about 36 % of humanity.

Modern energy consumption is perfectly correlated to the Human Development Index (HDI) but it still eludes the bottom 2.5 billion who remain energy starved. While 1.5 billion among them, including over 500 million from India, have no access to electricity, 2.2 billion, including some 850 million from India use some form of biomass as their primary or only source of energy for cooking food –the most basic human necessity. A larger number would be denied access were we to price energy, one of earth’s fastest depleting natural resource, at its true value. The primary reason for this is the continuing disproportionate consumption by the well-to-do.

OECD countries, with a combined population less than India enjoy the world’s highest living standards. Yet, OECD’s incremental commercial energy consumption for the period 1997-2007 (before the financial crisis); was 3.2 times that of India. During this period, India’s share of global commercial energy consumption rose from 2.9% to 3.6% while OECD’s share fell from 58% to just over 50%. This drop was singularly due to the growth of China’s share as it became the world’s largest energy consumer.

The disproportionate consumption of energy is far worse than the figures reveal. In a globalized world, big business has moved significant parts of OECD’s production base in search of cheaper natural capital including the environmental commons, which though priceless, is still available for free in China and the developing world.

If one looks at GHG emission on a consumption basis and not production within their borders, then EU 15 emissions are up by 47% and the US emissions have risen 43% since 1990. The embedded emissions in imports of EU-15 are about 33% of emissions within their borders. This translates to about 3 tons per capita of embedded emissions in imports. The embedded emissions import for the US is 20% or about 4 tons/capita – In 2000, the level of embedded emissions imports in both the US and EU15 were only 3% . The embedded emissions alone in imports for US and EU-15 are twice and 1.6 times respectively of India’s total per capita GHG emissions.

The greatest lie that we are being told by big business and the policy makers supported by them is that resource efficiency is the answer to sustainability. Despite huge gains in resource use efficiency, the world is consuming more natural capital today than ever before and we are on auto pilot to at least a 3.5 degree Celsius warming. If IPCC is right, this will unleash catastrophic events and mass annihilation of the world’s poor in the foreseeable future.

Simply stated, current patterns of consumption and production, ladies and gentlemen, are unsustainable. CSR activities such as opening schools and hospitals or green-washing board rooms with efficient lights are simply inadequate. Also inadequate is a business mindset that first influences and then merely meets current regulations and sees value only in monetary terms based on a simplistic cost-benefit analysis

We need a policy framework that first limits our use of fossil fuels and other forms of natural capital and then gradually reduces it in a cradle to cradle paradigm fuelled by innovation. Our growth model must be an inclusive one that reduces unsustainable overconsumption by a few and redistributes that to the bottom 50% of this world. No, I do not seek to make the poor rich by making the rich poor – I simply seek the right of the bottom 50% of the world to have a dignity of life afforded by consumption at 50% of the poverty levels within the OECD. The current inequities whereby the world’s third largest economy in PPP terms (India) is placed 134th in terms of its HDI and has the world’s largest concentration of poor, malnourished adults and under-weight children are unsustainable.

Enlightened business leaders must not only define sustainability in terms of guaranteeing inter-generational resource equity but also see the unsustainability of not removing current intra generational inequities and thereby delivering the minimal adaptive capacity to the bottom 2.5 billion of fellow humans in the face of impending abrupt climate events.

In closing, I quote Mahatma Gandhi who said: “The world has enough to meet everyone’s need but not enough to satisfy even one man’s greed!

I thank you for your time and attention.

Money — Love it or Hate it

Whatever its raison-d’etre may be, there is a need for more, and an unquenchable greed. And paradoxically, if you want to try to quench a bit of your greed, the best way to do it is to fan the greed in others. This is why the email scams (you know, the Nigerian banker requesting your help in moving $25 million of unclaimed inheritance, or the Spanish lottery eager to give you 67 million Euros) still hold a fascination for us, even when we know that we will never fall for it.

There is only a thin blurry line between the schemes that thrive on other people’s greed and confidence jobs. If you can come up with a scheme that makes money for others, and stay legal (if not moral), then you will make yourself very rich. We see it most directly in the finance and investment industry, but it is much more widespread than that. We can see that even education, traditionally considered a higher pursuit, is indeed an investment against future earnings. Viewed in that light, you will understand the correlation between the tuition fees at various schools and the salaries their graduates command.

When I started writing this column, I thought I was making up this new field called the Philosophy of Money (which, hopefully, somebody would name after me), but then I read up something on the philosophy of mind by John Searle. It turned out that there was nothing patentable in this idea, nor any cash to be made, sadly. Money comes under the umbrella of objective social realities that are quite unreal. In his exposition of the construction of social reality, Searle points out that when they give us a piece of paper and say that it is legal tender, they are actually constructing money by that statement. It is not a statement about its attribute or characteristics (like “This is a glass of water”) so much as a statement of intentionality that makes something what it is (like “You are my hero”). The difference between my being a hero (perhaps only to my six-year-old) and money being money is that the latter is socially accepted, and it is as objective a reality as any.

I conclude this article with the nagging suspicion that I may not have argued my point well enough. I started it with the premise that money is an unreal meta-thing, and wound up asserting its objective reality. This ambivalence of mine may be a reflection of our collective love-hate relationship with money – perhaps not such a bad way to end this column after all.

Photo by 401(K) 2013

Money — Why do We Crave it?

Given that the investment value is also measured and returned in terms of money, we get the notion of compound interest and “putting money to work.” Those who have money demand returns based on the investment risk they are willing to assume. And the role of modern financial system becomes one of balancing this risk-reward equation. Finance professionals focus on the investment value of money to make oodles of it. It not so much that they take your money as deposits, lend it out as loans, and earn the spread. Those simple times are gone for good. The banks make use of the fact that investors demand the highest possible return for the lowest possible risk. Any opportunity to push this risk-reward envelope is a profit potential. When they make money for you, they demand their compensation and you are happy to pay it.

Put it that way, investment sounds like a positive concept, which it is, in our current mode of thinking. We can easily make it a negative thing by portraying the demand for the investment value of money as greed. It then follows that all of us are greedy, and that it is our greed that fuels the insane compensation packages of top-level executives. Greed also fuels fraud – ponzi and pyramid schemes.

Indeed, any kind of strong feeling that you have can be bought and sold for personal gain of others. It may be your genuine sympathy for the Tsunami or earthquake victims, your voyeuristic disgust at the peccadilloes of golf icons or presidents, charitable feeling toward kidney patients of whatever. And the way money is made out of your feelings may not be obvious at all. Watching the news five minutes longer than usual because of a natural disaster may bring extra fortune to the network’s coffers. But of all the human frailties one can make money out of, the easiest is greed, I think. Well, I may be wrong; it may actually be that frailty that engendered the oldest profession. But I would think that the profession based on the lucrative frailty of greed wasn’t all that far behind.

If we want to exploit other people’s greed, the first thing to ask ourselves is this: why do we want money, given that it is a meta-entity? I know, we all need money to live. But I am not talking about the need part. Assuming the need part is taken care of, we still want more of it. Why? Say you are a billionaire. Why would you want another billion? I think the answer lies in something philosophical, something of an existential angst, although those with their billions would the last ones to admit it. The reason behind this deep-rooted need for more is a quest for a validation, or a justification for our existence, and a meaning and purpose for our life. It is all part of that metaphorical holy grail. I know, it sounds a bit nutty, but what else could it be? The Des Cartes of our time would say, “I have loads of money, therefore I am!”

The Ultra Rich

Let’s first take a look at how people make money. Loads of it. Apparently, it is one of the most frequently searched phrases in Google, and the results usually attempt to separate you from your cash rather than help you make more of it.

To be fair, this column won’t give you any get-rich-quick, sure-fire schemes or strategies. What it will tell you is why and how some people make money, and hopefully uncover some new insights. You may be able to put some of these insights to work and make yourself rich – if that’s where you think your happiness lies.

By now, it is clear to most people that they cannot become filthy rich by working for somebody else. In fact, that statement is not quite accurate. CEOs and top executives all work for the shareholders of the companies that employ them, but are filthy rich. At least, some of them are. But, in general, it is true that you cannot make serious money working in a company, statistically speaking.

Working for yourself – if you are very lucky and extremely talented – you may make a bundle. When we hear the word “rich,” the people that come to mind tend to be

  1. entrepreneurs/industrialists/software moguls – like Bill Gates, Richard Branson etc.,
  2. celebrities – actors, writers etc.,
  3. investment professionals – Warren Buffet, for instance, and
  4. fraudsters of the Madoff school.

There is a common thread that runs across all these categories of rich people, and the endeavors that make them their money. It is the notion of scalability. To understand it well, let’s look at why there is a limit to how much money you can make as a professional. Let’s say you are a very successful, highly-skilled professional – say a brain surgeon. You charge $10k a surgery, of which you perform one a day. So you make about $2.5 million a year. Serious money, no doubt. How do you scale it up though? By working twice as long and charging more, may be you can make $5 million or $10 million. But there is a limit you won’t be able to go beyond.

The limit comes about because the fundamental economic transaction involves selling your time. Although your time may be highly-skilled and expensive, you have only 24 hours of it in a day to sell. That is your limit.

Now take the example of, say, John Grisham. He spends his time researching and writing his best-selling books. In that sense, he sells his time as well. But the big difference is that he sells it to many people. And the number of people he sells his product to may have an exponential dependence on its quality and, therefore, the time he spends on it.

We can see a similar pattern in software products like Windows XP, performances by artists, sports events, movies and so on. One performance or accomplishment is sold countless times. With a slight stretch of imagination, we can say that entrepreneurs are also selling their time (that they spend setting up their businesses) multiple times (to customers, clients, passengers etc.) All these money-spinners work hard to develop some kind of exponential volume-dependence on the quality of their products or the time they spend on them. This is the only way to address the scalability issue that comes about due to the paucity of time.

Investment professionals (bankers) do it too. They develop new products and ideas that they can sell to the masses. In addition, they make use of a different aspect of money that we touched upon in an earlier column. You see, money has a transactional value. It plays the role of a medium facilitating economic exchanges. In financial transactions, however, money becomes the entity that is being transacted. Financial systems essentially move money from savings and transforms it into capital. Thus money takes on an investment value, in addition to its intrinsic transactional value. This investment value is the basis of interest.

Philosophy of Money

Money is a strange thing. It is quite unlike any other “thing” that we know. Its value manifests itself only in a social context where we have pre-agreed conventions as to what it should be. In this sense, money is not a thing at all, but a meta-thing, which is why you are happy when your boss gives you a letter stating that you got a fat bonus even though you never actually see the physical thing. Well, if it is not physical, it is metaphysical, and we can certainly talk about the philosophy of money.

The first indication of the meta-ness of money comes from the fact that it has a value only when we assign it a value. It doesn’t possess an intrinsic value that, for instance, water does. If you are thirsty, you find that water has enormous intrinsic value. Of course, if you have money, you can buy water (or Perrier, if you want to be sophisticated), and quench your thirst.

But we may find ourselves in situations where we may not be able to buy things with money. Stranded in a desert, for instance, dying of thirst, we may not be able to buy water despite our sky-high credit limits or the hundreds of dollars we may have in our wallet. One reason for this inability of ours is obvious – we may be alone. The basic transactional value of money evaporates when we have nobody to transact with.

The second dimension of the meta-ness of money is economical. It is illustrated in the well-worn supply-and-demand principle, assuming transactional liquidity (which is a term I just cooked up to sound erudite, I confess). I mean to say, even if we have willing sellers of water in the desert, they may see that we are dying for it and jack up the price – just because we are willing and able to pay. This apparent ripping off on the part of the devious vendors of water (perfectly legal, by the way) is possible only if the commodity in question is in plentiful supply. We need commodity liquidity, as it were.

It is when the liquidity dries up that the fun begins. The last drop of water in a desert has infinite intrinsic value. This effect may look similar to the afore-mentioned supply-and-demand phenomenon, but it really is different. The intrinsic value dominates everything else, much like the strong force over short distances in particle physics. And this domination is the flipside of the law of diminishing marginal utility in economics.

The thing that looks a bit bizarre about money is that it seems to run counter to the law of diminishing marginal utility. The more money you have, the more you want it. Now, why is that? It is especially strange given its lack of intrinsic value. Great financial minds could not figure it out, but came up with pithy and memorable statements like, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Although that particular genius was only fictional, he does epitomize much of the thinking in the modern corporate and financial world. Good or bad, let’s assume that greed is an essential part of human nature and look at what we can do with it. Note that I want to do something “with” it, not “about” it – an important distinction. I, intrepid columnist that I am, want to show you how to use other people’s greed to make more money.

Photo by 401(K) 2013