Boaz Weinstein’s opening move on Wall Street came as a result of chess. According to NY Times' Dealbook Mr. Weinstein, now a star hedge fund manager, was trying to get a summer job at Goldman Sachs in 1991, when he was just 18. After being told there was nothing available, he stopped in a bathroom on the way out and ran into David F. Delucia, then the head of corporate bond trading.
Mr. Delucia, who is ranked as an expert by the United States Chess Federation, had played Mr. Weinstein, ranked as a master by the federation, many times. He arranged for a series of interviews until Mr. Weinstein got an internship on a Goldman trading desk.
Mr. Weinstein is not alone among Wall Streeters who have a chess connection. Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal who now runs the hedge fund Clarium Capital, is also a chess master, and Douglas Hirsch, the founder of Seneca Capital, while not an expert, has become an ardent chess enthusiast.
Chess helps in trading, Mr. Weinstein said. To become a good chess player, he learned to focus on how he made decisions because he could not calculate the results of all his possible moves. Learning to deal with that uncertainty or risk has been useful. When you make an investment, “you can have an 80 percent chance of being right. And then the 20 percent comes up,” he said. “But really it is the process that you used to make the decision.....”
Get the big picture at http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/good-at-chess-a-hedge-fund-may-want-to-hire-you/?ref=business
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