At Caffe Vivaldi in New York’s Greenwich Village, Peter Muller bangs out a repertoire full of Carole King riffs on the piano along with his own soft-rock compositions that draw on the likes of Van Morrison and Cat Stevens. About 40 blocks uptown in a 42-story skyscraper overlooking Duffy Square, straw-haired Muller, 47, performs for a tougher crowd -- as the multimillionaire math whiz behind one of Wall Street’s most secretive trading machines, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August issue.
Muller is the founder of Morgan Stanley (MS)’s Process Driven Trading group, or PDT, a 70-person band of Ph.D.s and computer jockeys. They use algorithm-rich programs to bet Morgan Stanley’s money on pricing discrepancies in global markets.
Muller, who has had no outside investors to please, has kept the strategies and performance of PDT under wraps, stoking the curiosity and envy of rivals.
“They say: ‘I know him. He made a boatload of money for Morgan Stanley,’” says Arjun Divecha, chairman of Boston-based GMO LLC, who manages about $18 billion using quantitative techniques. “They don’t know how he’s done it.”
Muller makes no apologies for his obsessive secrecy. “I want my competitors to know absolutely nothing about what we do,” Muller says in his corner office, which is decorated with pictures of his wife, Jillian, and their two children as well as a pair of battered snowboards he retired years ago…
There’s more. Find it at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-07/morgan-stanley-s-yoga-troubadour-crossword-math-pro-flees-with-20-returns.html
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