Financial Judo

*** I know this is on Dealbreaker, but I wanted to open it up for conversation here, so no hating. ***

Judo is premised around looking for a weakness in your opponent's stance and then using their own weight against them. Every person in finance is hoping to land a huge deal, create a new product, find a new arb opportunity, or exploit a weakness in the system. Why? To milk the hell out of it, and get rich....Just like this guy did.

Very, very long story short, this dude scoured the actuarial structures and underwriting rules of annuity products and found a way to have financial instititutions issue a life insurance-like payout to the beneficiaries of people who were about to die. You can skip the rest of this post, that's the meat and potatos.

Yeah we're supposed to be outraged, blah blah blah, but he basically channeled money directly from financial institutions to his clients and got a piece of the action. I clicked "LIKE". Think of it this way: this is a period of time where the public hates us, people are protesting us on our way to work, and the government is churning out a mind numbing amounts of new rules for us to deal with. Add to this that well over half a million people in this industry have bit the dust in the last few years, that banks are sitting on GINORMOUS cash reserves, are revising bonus plans, and oh yes, it's going to get much worse before it gets better...if you're lucky enough to survive the next round of 'corrections'. I'm new to industry, like a lot of you, so it's frustrating because we're being punished for stuff other people did. It's demoralizing.

So in my mind, this is refreshing: dude comes into financial industry, gets smart, and makes a killing. AND drives a literal legion of lawyers nuts when they try to stop him while doing right by his clients, just as a bonus.

It's no secret that my sympathies are for the average folk and I'm honest about it. Truth is, the overwhelming majority of people even in finance aren't going to end up gazillionaires, and who cares. My point: the insurance companies should have been smarter and more disciplined, but instead they were short term greedy. Now they are being punished, and he's just a drop in the bucket. Annuities are at the center of huge write downs lately, and they did this to themselves.

But social justice, corporate governance, or crime aren't why we're here. We came to this industry to find a way to cash in and check out. Remember when you read Monkey Business to prepare yourself for your first job? Consider this advance training for the next phase: getting yours and getting out.

What's your scheme? What do you think of this guy? And how funny is it that this one dude outsmarted high powered lawyers, and legal, compliance, and risk departments at some of the world's largest and most sophisticated institutions?