Blythe Masters Quotes

The good thing about a dealer's derivatives portfolio is that it is marked to market.

We've used derivatives for many, many years. I don't think derivatives are evil, per se, I think they are dangerous.

Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.

Traditionally, we think that people with ideas are innovators - that Silicon Valley is the world of ideas. But within the hedge-fund world, they believe that they are men of ideas - that the trade is unto itself one of ideas.

I started John W. Henry & Company because I enjoyed applying mathematics to markets, and it was a profound challenge that resonated within me.

When they are employed wisely, derivatives make the world simpler because they give their buyers an ability to manage and transfer risk.

Derivatives are like sex. It's not who we're sleeping with, it's who they're sleeping with that's the problem.

We concluded that you cannot rely on delta hedging alone. It sounds simplistic to say that now, but back then, this was the sort of thing people were only just beginning to realize.

I didn't become interested in derivatives until 1982, 1983.

Derivatives are a huge, complex issue.

Derivatives in and of themselves are not evil. There's nothing evil about how they're traded, how they're accounted for, and how they're financed, like any other financial instrument, if done properly.

Credit default swaps were nothing more than souped up versions of things that have been around for a long time like soy bean futures

I'm a futures man.

My life is like a series of comic strips, which is why I like investing: I really like new stuff.

I don't see any magic in hedge funds.

My career in academic research has not been involved with active management of securities. I've tried to understand risk-and-return relationships; also the pricing of derivative securities.

Our system is dynamic, always shifting gears. What I do is I build models to beat the market.

Main Street investors, who cannot trade credit default swaps, should not be tempted to trade an instrument with the same risk profile simply because it has been given a different name.

You know what term you don't hear anymore? Arbitrage. The markets have gotten too efficient.

My dad used to sell a type of commodity contract. It was so complicated, he was certain his sales people didn't understand what they were selling.

When you look at a commodities market you need hedgers and speculators. If you don't have one, you don't have a market. That's how it works.

There are challenges in terms of the measurement of VAR for what are known as nonlinear derivatives, where things like gamma and vega are important dimensions of the risk.

The discussion of derivatives in the political world has become a zero sum game.

Arbitrage proof has since been widely used throughout finance and economics.

Briefly speaking, our conclusion is that stochastic volatility does not make a huge difference as far as the pricing is concerned if you get the average volatility right. It makes a big difference as far as hedging is concerned.