David Sraer教授是一位在金融领域具有深厚学术背景和丰富教学经验的学者。他在法国图卢兹经济学院(TSE)攻读经济学博士学位,师从John Ciao教授。完成博士学位后,Sraer教授前往美国,在普林斯顿大学经济系担任教授数年。自2014年起,他一直在加州大学伯克利分校(UC Berkeley)工作,主要研究领域包括公司金融和行为金融学。
I think the main advice that I like to give students who want to pursue a career in finance is really to understand that finance is not just a formula. It's about understanding that finance is more than just numbers and calculations; it's a way to comprehend the world around us.
So a lot of what people teach in quantitative finance goes back to what I was saying before: the pricing of an asset is just the pricing of its fundamentals. We can think about things in very mathematical terms, like a diffusion process for the underlying, you know, dividends, and then we can sort of think about how to price this depending on the model we have in mind.
But I think this is not the full picture of financial markets. If you want to be a good finance professional, you have to understand the securities you're pricing. If you're going to price stocks, you have to understand what is the company that underlies the stocks. At heart, you have to be an economist; you have to understand what's driving the profit of the company, how does the company evolve in its strategic environment.
Then you want to think also about the macroeconomy, you want to think about interest rates, prices, growth, innovation—all the things that are going to matter for forming your opinion about how to think about financial markets. And sometimes students tend to forget that and they tend to think, ‘Well, I can just summarize all financial markets into a black box formula or some pricing formula.’
So, I think a big advice is to keep being curious about the world, keep thinking like an economist, read the newspapers, think about the global picture. I think this is a really important edge you will get if you do that as opposed to being sort of a more narrow-minded quant who just thinks, ‘I know one pricing formula, let me apply it without really understanding what I'm doing.’