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Finance Professional: PhD + Wall Street + Consulting Experience
Darren B.

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Hourly Rate: $75

About Darren


Bio

I am a Wharton Statistics & Finance PhD and an independent trader (both discretionary bets and statistical arbitrage). At Wharton, I was a TA for asset pricing, stochastic processes, applied statistics and empirical finance. I then worked on Wall Street for 4 years before starting my own small business. In my sell-side days I passed Series 7 and 3. I have worked in proprietary analytical systems and commercial software like Matlab, R, SAS and Stata.

I do enjoy consulting and teaching. They...

I am a Wharton Statistics & Finance PhD and an independent trader (both discretionary bets and statistical arbitrage). At Wharton, I was a TA for asset pricing, stochastic processes, applied statistics and empirical finance. I then worked on Wall Street for 4 years before starting my own small business. In my sell-side days I passed Series 7 and 3. I have worked in proprietary analytical systems and commercial software like Matlab, R, SAS and Stata.

I do enjoy consulting and teaching. They say it gets you onto a completely different level of understanding the material if you can explain it to somebody else. Successfully. In my teaching & consulting life I have graduated several PhD students, in addition to helping undergrads, graduate students, researchers and business professionals. While at Wharton I taught big sections (up to 40 students), which is a decent medium for honing public speaking skills. Later on, I have worked with 1-3 clients at a time. Even though not as “flashy” as auditorium teaching, the consulting format allows for more lasting impact, deeper intellectual penetration. Much like TV allows the showrunner to develop a character better than cinema.

How is my teaching style different from somebody else? Well, there are many good people out there. Having that said, I am a matter of fact. Straight to the point. Not overly excited over the Central Limit Theorem (“everything converges to grey”, ok). I will not spend more of your time on the project than necessary.

There is only so much one can put in an introduction. Please feel free to reach out for more detailed information… I do know my field.


Education

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Mathematics
University of Pennsylvania
PhD

Policies


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Approved Subjects

MATLAB

MATLAB

Matlab is quite popular among finance academics. And so, I dived into it while at the b-school. Used it for my thesis. At first, I appreciated Matlab for its flexibility, straightforward syntax and rich visualization tools. I came to program several customized techniques: reduced-form models for risk management and derivative pricing, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, change-point detection, stochastic optimization, etc. Much later I started helping clients with Matlab projects, big and small. Those mostly covered regression, time series analysis, cluster analysis, Longstaff-Schwartz, CDO pricing, stochastic volatility modeling, reinforcement learning, discriminant analysis, gradient boosting and “simple” neural nets. Overall, I have 18 solid years of Matlab experience with a 5-year gap in between. Projects are not everything. Sometimes I administer real-time screen sharing to go over the past code, generate new scripts and help the client to hone her programming skills. You’ll be surprised how much can be done in 2 hours.
STATA

STATA

Stata is a powerful tool for econometric analysis: time series, causality, panel data, instrumental variables, ARCH/GARCH, cointegration, GLM, etc. Stata was developed by mostly econometricians and is being polished by mostly econometricians. What is an econometrician? A statistical who takes only finance/economics problems close to heart (the statistical techniques are mostly the same when compared to, say, biostatistics)… Nonetheless, Stata offers a standard selection of traditional statistical methods: regression, analysis of covariance, nonparametrics, robust estimation, factor analysis, simulation, etc. Many options, many checks, decent memory management. I appreciate Stata especially for its handling of robust errors, mixed-effects models, survival analysis tools and missing data imputation. Over the past 12 years, I have helped clients with literally all of the mentioned topics. Have not used Stata much for my own proprietary trading needs. But still might. A true digger should have several analytical tools at his/her disposal.
Finance
Microsoft Excel
Probability
R
Statistics
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Hourly Rate: $75
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