Hedge Fund ManagerTypical Day

Money never sleeps so why should you? Remember that this is a crazy job for crazy people. So there is no “day” for Orville Octaneeater. He sleeps when he can, hoping for a few moments of lucidity during the period of time between weekends when money… well, rests. Albeit a cat-nap. 

Orville trades options for a billion dollar hedge fund in Connecticut (most hedge funds moved out of New York because taxes were onerous.  Most are heading to Florida or Wyoming now because Connecticut got greedy and the internet works). He lives and dies on the VIX or Volatility Index, a mathematical measure, kinda, of the volatility of the stock market. The VIX is more or less how options are priced. 

But the pricing of options is rampant with market inefficiencies and Orville gets paid beaucoup bucks for identifying these imperfections. This circadian period, Orville awakens at 3 am to un-rent the bottle of Chateau Margeaux he drank 6 hours ago. He checks Europe which will open soon – looks like a mellow day with no big news items hitting the tape. 

He’s happy about this fact because he has made a “dead money trade” bet, wherein he sold put options on the market, hoping that time would grind away and the premium dollars he collected from nervous nellies for their protecting their downside would just expire when the option came due. He would have then kept all of his money and happily moved on. So boring is good.

^{Do something, nature.}

He sleeps another few hours and is up at 7 am to zip into the office and listen to the broker voicemails, process trades he’s thinking about making and listen to the general walla of the Street. His three partners are each already there and they kibbitz about the Euro (is it dead yet?), Greek unions (boy, I wish I could work 35 hours a week), and the Yankees.