John Seo: Catastrophe Bonds and the Investor Choice Problem — Manifold #61

Dr John Seo is co-founder and a managing director at Fermat Capital Management, LLC. He has over 30 years’ experience in fixed income bond and derivatives trading and has been active in the Insurance-Linked Securities (“ILS”) market for over 25 years. Prior to forming Fermat with his brother Nelson in 2001, Dr Seo was senior trader in the Insurance Products Group at Lehman Brothers, an officer of Lehman Re, and a state-appointed advisor to the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund. Dr. Seo’s work in catastrophe funds was featured in a cover article for the New York Times Magazine (‘In Nature’s Casino’ by Michael Lewis, 26 August 2007), and he has also testified before US Congress as an expert on the catastrophe bond market (‘Hearings from the 110th Congress’, 6 September 2007). Dr Seo holds a PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University and a BS in Physics from MIT. He is based in Connecticut.Steve and John discuss:00:00 Introduction00:36 Early Career and Influences02:10 The Investor Choice Problem07:21 Academic Background and Family Challenges12:43 First Steps in Finance30:39 Lehman Brothers37:29 Introduction to Cat Bonds44:53 Parallels Between Derivatives and Insurance Markets01:03:22 Building Fermat Capital01:09:51 Future of Catastrophe BondsMusic used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.--Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to [email protected] or Steve on Twitter @hsu_steve. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.