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Margin Call (2011) (YouTube Edit) (Patreon)

Published:
2025-05-29 15:40:24
Imported:
2026-06
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Margin Call (2011) (YouTube Edit)

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Actuarial Lurker

This is a fictional firm meant to be a composite of the dealers who dumped these assets on the morning of the main crash....

Actuarial Lurker

Yes they DO hire PhDs in Math, Physics, Engineering etc to work on Wall Street because the academy spits out too many PhDs every year and its a lot better to make high 6 figures on Wall Street than be a post-Doc or adjunct without tenure hoping to get a position. When I got my Masters degree in 2006 (I went back to school at night after getting a BS in Math and Physics in the 80s) we basically learned how these securities worked and how to model them on a laptop or even in EXCEL. Our faculty all had day jobs as consultants to Wall Street firms while being paid peanuts by the university. They did this to find smart people to try to hire into their own firms or for clients. As a boring actuary I never worked for any of these firms, but would rather have a soul and earn money honestly...The stochastic partial differential equations and "jump processes" used to model stock and commodity values and interest rates are the SAME math ones used to model the "HEAT equation" used for metal components, chambers, etc so the same PhDs that would design rocket parts, the engines of jet airplanes, would model stress and metal fatigue on hot parts, the evolution of plasma inside of nuclear reactors etc would be using similar systems of partial differential equations to model these Wall St securities. This is why the "sales guys" like Jeremy Irons' character don't understand what the hell they are selling since you basically need at least a Master's degree if not a PhD to do the modeling work.

Actuarial Lurker

The film is accurate in that "quants" like Quinto would model these assets by stripping them into their parts and combining their values to see what their "fair value" should be, risk managers would solve for how volatile the inputs into the equations would need to be for the "theoretical value" to wander more than the risk tolerance of the Demi Moore types and the Jeremy Irons people might STILL be economists or skilled traders who could "smell trouble" based on macro events

Actuarial Lurker

The subway at night is remarkably safe- the problem is that at that time of night the trains runs every 20 minutes rather than every 3-4 minutes like they do during the day due to lack of demand....its actually faster to take a cab and pray for green lights

Actuarial Lurker

The Kevin Spacey character got paid a flat $1.25 Million for 7 hours of looking the other way....