Group Secretary

An old curmudgeon who opens the mail, mans the phone and sorts out your entertainment and travel expenses? Oh, no.

The romantic view is that the Group Secretary is like Joan Harris from Mad Men: almost superhuman in aspect and outsized in most characteristics: a contrappostally engorged giantess, midway between a gorgon and a siren, by turns brutal, maternal and licentious, yielding quarter to no man under fifty, and certainly not to any star trader or young hotshot.

But Joan Harris is a neatly constructed archetype: each of her aspects, and what aspects they are, is recognisable in any good Group Secretary, but you'll never get them all at once, and the particular combinations you see will generally leave something to be desired. One constant is a dark and visceral loathing of young smart-arses who think they own the place.

Another is the wherewithal to act on that suppurating contempt.

For Group Secretaries, inevitably, have the unqualified and blind support of someone far more important than you. Politically, they are untouchable. It is never wise to cross them, question them, doubt them, banter with them, raise so much as a bemused eyebrow in their direction, or labour in any way under an impression that you are anything other than utterly at the mercy of their every whim. You are food; you are not their friend.

Don't make the mistake of thinking yours might be weak here: a Group Secretary can only develop to a maturity with such a sponsor. Speak softly, and carry a big stick.

The Group Secretary fears no-one other than the Chief Operating Officer, but even then only in concept, because the two will usually be fast friends and allies: a more fearsome bloc can scarcely be proposed.

Geek Paradox

The Geek Paradox, which has been described as "a biological anomaly which reverses the established natural order of all things", "an abomination before God who created all things bright and beautiful" and "cogent evidence that there is a God after all, and that he is largely as described in the New Testament, since the meek seem finally to be inheriting the Earth", is a theorem deriving from observations made largely in investment bank habitats and those Silicon Valley coffee emporias beloved of venture capitalists that, in finance at any rate, the small, scrawny guy with the questionable sense of humour and the unusual fixation on maths and computers gets the girl, the condo, the Lear Jet and the collection of Maseratis.
Elsewhere, this has come as something of a let-down. Everything we were taught in school led us to believe that the strong silent types who were incredibly popular, handsome, captained the first XV, led mountaineering expeditions to K2, sang baritone in the Chapel Choir, won the inter-house Tae Kwon Do competition and relentlessly victimised the unfortunate weedy kids who hung out in the computer lab toting 7" floppies with hacked copies of Castle Wolfenstein, misappropriating their lunch money, were the ones in life destined to win, have glamorous wives, beautiful children, and swan about in late-model race-tuned BMW roadsters.
But no: a glance around a trading floor tells quite a different story. Losing a bit of pocket money in one's teens transpires to be quite the formative experience, it seems.

Defender

Defender was an early arcade video game, of the generation after the original space invaders, which involved being a pilot in a small star fighter flying over a planet trying to rescue little sticky things and avoiding a host of more or less aggressive beasty things which are trying to kill you. One has a number of tools at ones disposal, including a laser cannon that makes an impressive sound and fires a stream of annihilation (far more satisfying than the little pellets emitted in space invaders), a limited supply of smart bombs which blow up all bad guys on the screen but don't harm the good guys, and the ability to randomly jump into hyperspace if things were getting really tricky (a move of last resort, as you have no idea how sticky the place would be where you wound up)

As such Defender was, and remains, one of the best sources of neat metaphors for the vicissitudes of life (but is still not as good on that score as cricket).

Microsoft Word

Microsoft word is the "home application" for those billions of people in the world who don't really like software applications but are forced, by the need to put food on the table, to use them. Microsoft Word is therefore the personification of a necessary evil, and in the business world its adherents make up the smallest of the lost tribes of Microsoft. 

A paradox associated with Microsoft Word is that, no matter how clever it becomes, (and these days it's pretty clever - I mean, they've even got the auto-numbering to work) 80% of the people who use it aren't up to anything smarter than changing the font size, so its functionality goes untouched. These are the same people who hit the return key fifty times to get to a new page, would consider entering a manual page break to be incredibly smart and can't even conceive of the idea that you could build a page break into a paragraph style, largely because they can't conceive of the idea of a "paragraph style" at all.

In the business world, the sorts of people who belong to the "Microsoft word" tribe tend to reside in the legal department. They would never use Excel, even if their lives depended on it, and are innately (and correctly) suspicious of anyone bearing a PowerPoint presentation, and anything contained in it. 

Vega

As all portfolio managers who have ever bought an apartment know, in the immortal words of Candadian songstress Suzanne Luca:

My name is Vega

I live on the second floor

I lives upstairs from you

Yes I think I've seen you before

Vega is, technically, "the rate of change in volatility of an option", meaning the greater the volatility the more vega you have. Volatility is affected by a number of things, but most commonly by leverage - or borrowing money from the bank to make more of a speculative investment than you can actually afford. Hence the smarty-pants reference to apartments for, if you've ever bought one with the assistance of mortgage finance, you've amped up your vega.

Vega is also one of the Greeks. As classicists are fond of reminding the youngsters, Vega is not actually the name of any Greek letter (the Greek letter "v" is called nu), but this only goes to show portfolio managers tend to know more about Canadian singer songwriters than they do about classical typography. And if you didn't know that you've got bigger things to worry about.

Anyway, vega is relevant, if you're really interested, in the calculation of Black-Scholes formulae for pricing European options, but it is more relevant in that it is frequently (and some might say) wilfully) mistaken for alpha by uninspiring fund managers and their associates. If you ever see the expression leveraged alpha you may be fairly sure there's some buffoonery at work, and the victim of it is most likely to be you.

Leveraged Alpha

Snake Oil, basically.

Leveraged alpha is technically possible, but in practice harder to find than the proverbial West Coast Pub on Anzac Day. 

what most people claim to be leveraged alpha is, usually, really plain old vega - that is, just leverage. If your market benchmark is beating the borrowing rate, you will make money by borrowing.

If someone pitches "leveraged alpha" product to you, they are most likely a charlatan - which you would expect, it being the financial markets and all - and a mediocre manager. Especially if they use backtesting to demonstrate their historical alpha.

Go hunting for charlatans here. 

Greeks

It is a little-known fact that the expression "beware of Greeks bearing gifts" is not an oblique reference to the Iliad, but in fact a truism handed down through generations of portfolio managers warning their young kinfolk about the perils of option pricing. The full expression is:

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, especially vega and leveraged alpha.

Greeks, in financial argot, refer to letters in the Greek Alphabet - alpha, beta, delta, and vega*, and they are approximations representing the market sensitivities of options or other derivatives. Each Greek measures a different aspect of the risk in an option position. Through understanding and managing these Greeks, financial market participants can manage their risks appropriately, whether they deal in OTC or exchange-traded options.

Through mangling them, and particularly by conflating alpha and vega, less talented market participants can make their structured products sound a lot cleverer and more exotic than in truth they really are.

*Classicists may notice that Vega isn't actually a letter in the Greek Alphabet, but a Canadian Singer-Songwriter.