Bill Gross's Asperger
In a recent Bloomberg interview, former bond king Bill Gross revealed that he has known for some times that he has Asperger syndrome. He noted that perhaps having Autistic Spectrums Disorder have benefited him as an investor as not being able to be affected by emotion for minute movement in the market allowed him to focus on the long term picture.
I just want to know if there is any Asperger patient here on WSO (diagnosed or not); and how have your experience in your professional life been?
HighlyLeveredCat, pure crickets, that's where I come in. Any of these useful?
Hope that helps.
Yes, I am on the autism spectrum. It means that to get a job in banking I literally memorized exactly what I needed to say, how to say it, and how to come across as the sort of person that is hireable. I memorized it like an actor learning my lines, studying not just the finance but exactly how to come across to seem normal. This meant reading all the guides and saying EXACTLY what I was told to say, with the words carefully planned, rehearsed, timed and memorized.
When I did not do this and decided to “wing it”, I actually got rejected by literally 100% of investment banks and consulting firms - no joke. When I was in college I did not yet know I was autistic, but by this point I had developed mimicry and extreme forms of rehearsal as a coping strategy. Once I picked myself up from the failures and decided to just say what needed to be said, I got a job at an elite boutique in New York.
The challenge of being autistic is that the coping strategies that work for you when you are young cannot readily work in the workplace. When young, an autistic can choose to avoid others and bury the mind in intense interests. But when you are in investment banking, you cannot run away from social situations and you are actually forced to spread yourself across many projects (but autistics do well with intense focus on a small number of areas). Investment banking is a horrible job if you are autistic - it is literally the worst possible job for you in many ways. But this is true for a lot of other business-related jobs as well (except maybe marketing, hedge funds, trading or non-business fields like engineering). I was the most technically apt in my analyst class but it didn’t matter much. The reality is that I had a horrible time because I found the politics to be intensely confusing. If you are autistic, you do well socially if you rehearse and generalize from patterns in social behavior - that said, this is hard to do when you are an analyst because you don’t have the time to think about what to do socially.
I eventually worked in public markets. I liked this role a lot better and I got paid more last year than anyone in my analyst class in banking. Honestly, if you are autistic, but are highly intelligent and learn the appropriate coping mechanisms, then I think you make a great hedge fund analyst. I truly do think my autism is a superpower in many ways, because it allows me to see situations more bravely and in a way free of groupthink. The world has enough smart and pedigreed people, but what it lacks is courage to act on your beliefs when different. Don’t ever let anyone convince you that being autistic must be a weakness or that the world can’t value you. It can, but you just need to learn to play to your strengths.
You just sound like a sociopath
it's actually the opposite of being a sociopath. a sociopath lacks emotional empathy, but I lack cognitive empathy. i care how others feel or whether they are sad or hurt; but, I couldn't care what they thought or how they acted even if I wanted to. a sociopath /psychopath is typically the opposite, though to be fair I tend to get these mixed up. my understanding is sociopaths do not care how others feel, but they often do care what they think / how they behave. the sociopath cares about this because it allows them to better manipulate others to their own advantage. there's a great talk on this subject from Simon Baron Cohen (brother of actor in Borat) on this on YouTube if you look.
You are an idiot
Edit: WSO's response mechanism /design is way too hard to read. It's too difficult to see I'm not responding to Bobby's post, for example.
Good post.
Curiously, would your ‘symptoms’ be considered quite extreme? I’ve always wondered if have a very mild/high-functioning ASD, but hearing you describe your thought process and social interaction sounds very extreme and alien to me. The flags in my case are: zero empathy, strong aversion to change, above average intelligence (by population standards, not necessarily for this board), unique pattern of thought, and (slightly) eccentric personality.
I’d err on the side of ‘socially-awkward’, but am still very confident navigating social interactions when required – I’ve also worked in a client facing role for 10 years, so maybe something I’ve learnt. I’d say I’m genuinely disinterested in other people, yet can be very articulate in describing their personality traits – for example, when gossiping. This seems inconsistent with ASD.
Anyway, not looking for a diagnosis, but curious what a diagnosed aspie would think of the above. Maybe my willingness to write this on the public forum is its own diagnosis.
I actually think my case is mild. if you read stories of typical people on the spectrum they don’t cope nearly as well as I have and many of them end up unemployed. It’s pretty easy to see why this is the case - you’re kind of naturally unpleasant if you are autistic. unless you are exceptionally talented you will 100% be the person people want to get rid of.
If I had done things again I would have tried to become a surgeon. That’s a great job for being autistic, because nobody will care if you are weird if less people die in your hands.
I’m not saying my case was easy. It’s very hard for me to get along with others. I can learn to act in an interview but on the job I come across like a bit of an alien. The best I can do is dress the part, stay quiet and tightly follow a conservative script when I talk to my superiors, because if I don’t do this I know I will get in trouble. A big challenge is that if you are aspie you will basically always have trouble navigating authority figures, particularly because it is understood you are supposed to lie or avoid mentioning certain things to help your bosses ego usually and that is challenging for the Aspie. Social situations are a minefield for me, because I just never know when I’ll say something that doesn’t respect the authority of my boss. The reality is that I know that I will eventually make a social mistake that I don’t notice that will upset someone, but hey that’s life.
“Zero empathy” sounds more akin to ASPD to me, which is what I have :) feel free to PM if you wanna explore more in that area.
I was misdiagnosed as being an aspie for a long time, until I saw a great psychiatrist who pegged my ASPD. He literally sounded like he was reciting my life story back to me. I guess I’m a textbook example or something.
Edit for clarity: ASPD = antisocial personality disorder. Also known as mild psychopathy ;)
"When I was in college I did not yet know I was autistic" - BobbybananamA can you talk a bit about your process for formal diagnosis? My understanding is that it is very challenging to diagnose ASD in adults so I'm wondering (1) what "tipped you off" that you may have ASD, (2) the avenues you took to try to get a formal evaluation, and (3) what you now do with such knowledge.
Happy to chat over PM if you'd prefer.
Thanks!
For diagnosis, you can take a test online https://psychcentral.com/quizzes/autism-test/. If you test high, then you can see a psychologist. The diagnosis is not at all to do with how awkward you are - it's a cluster of seemingly unrelated traits like your sensitivity to light / sound as well as when you developed the ability to speak as a kid. I spent about $500 out of pocket for a 5 hour intake with a psychologist over a period of 3 separate visits.
Asperger's wasn't even a diagnosis until the early 1990s, but it takes 10 years for society to catch up. So, if you were born before the year 2000, then you are unlikely to have been diagnosed as a child unless your autistic traits either caused you to harm someone else or caused academic under-achievement. As a result, many people born after the year 2000 with high-functioning autism (Asperger's) are diagnosed in adulthood. Usually this occurs when you fail to enter the workforce. It is common to fail to get a job at all if you are autistic because most interview processes don't really do much other than screen out people that are weird or "not a cultural fit." Unless the Aspie learns to be an excellent actor, a conventional interview process (if done well) should be fairly successful in preventing Aspie's from ever being hired. In my case, I learned to act well, so this did not screen me out. What tipped me off is how poorly I dealt with a period of conflict with my boss at the hedge fund I worked for. It is fairly common for people on the spectrum to be unable to deal with this sort of conflict well. This was a stressful period and when I described the conflict to a friend he recommended I look into it. When I took the test online, I was totally shocked at how well it described a seemingly unrelated cluster of tendencies I had (many of which are unrelated to how you relate with people, but how you relate to sensory information in general). The day I took that online test and received an official diagnosis from my psychologist was one of the most important days of my life, because nothing before had better explained a general life arc of social challenges since elementary school. It also almost perfectly explained a similar pattern of traits in my father (who was never diagnosed).
Once you have that knowledge, you now know something about yourself. Specifically, you now know that your social challenges are due to you and not due to other factors. In the past, I explained a lot of past challenges in my life due to extenuating circumstances, but now I know that it is due to me, but also that it is not completely my fault. It helps you forgive yourself, but also it helps you know where you are blind. In my case, my blindness is that I cannot infer the thoughts of others like most normal humans can, but this inference is critical for normal human functioning. Most humans lie all the time, but as an autistic person you will find it painful to lie or if you lie you will always do it at the wrong times. Lying requires you usually to infer what others see as acceptable, which requires you to make inferences about when those statements are likely to be considered graceful in the eyes of others. In conversation, subtle is not a lie, but it is usually involves omitting certain facts for the sake of the comfort of others. Subtlety in dealing with a sensitive subject requires you to infer when you have communicated a message without actually saying the message directly; if you cannot infer what others are thinking, you will find it challenging to be subtle. Whenever I am the least bit subtle, I am so impressed with myself (but in reality other people do not think what I said was the least bit subtle). I now know that a lot of the approaches others take to fixing these problems will not work for me. Trusting your intuition will never work in solving the social challenges of an autistic person! The whole point is that I will not and will never have the right intuitions. One of the few solutions is to learn rules of social behavior and follow them mechanically like an actor reading a script. For example, when I have navigated situations successfully it is only because I think back to "ok when I said statement of type X, person Y made statement Z indicating a particular feeling to me. If I don't want him to feel that feeling, then maybe don't say statement of type X." In other words, an autistic person can still reason with "System II" (analytical, problem-solving reasoning) even if they can't reason with "System I" (automatic, intuitive reasoning). In cases, where you do not know what to do, you should trust 1-2 people to tell you what to do and you should just do that. An autistic person will never develop social intuition or be able to infer appropriate behavior, and so this aspect of decision-making essentially must be outsourced to someone else. Another way of saying this is that you cannot "be yourself" unless you work in a field where you do not need the cooperation of others (like academia, certain areas of medicine, some types of engineering). We all have to conform, but the pains of doing this will always just be higher if you are autistic and you just have to accept that or change your career choices accordingly.
Another good piece of advice I have read is to try to rely on other stuff to "pass" as neurotypical. If you are on the spectrum, you know for sure you are not going to succeed through your social graces, so don't try to. You actually do have to try to not let your lack of graces get in the way, but try to let yourself stand out for where you are strong - like exceptional attention to detail and focus. If you can't learn all the lines, you can wear the right costume. Dressing well is something anyone can learn. And a good aspie can just devour all the books on how to do that like I did. Or you can just choose to be intentionally more quiet. You can also just not drink a work events, knowing that you are likely to say something wrong. Another thing is to try to just be excessively nice to others and pray it offsets areas where you accidentally upset others; I don't do this, but I want to try to. You can also disclose to your employer how you work best, even if you don't disclose you are on the spectrum.
I mean probably
For anyone wondering where you fall on the spectrum for Asperger syndrome and Autism disorder, this test will give you an idea of where you're at before confirming with a clinical diagnoses -- https://aspergerstest.net/aq-test/
Per aspergerstest:
My little brother and some of my best friends score high on the spectrum. Their respective talents are amazing (e.g. mathematics, strategy and computer science). I doubt you'd even pick-up on it through several interpersonal encounters. I just feel like they don't particular care for socialization where others might.
Thanks for this. Got a 36... what do I do with this information?
Nothing
Got a 16. Exceedingly average.
this kind of a test doesn't mean that much, you are self diagnosing
only normies would self-diagnose
There are a lot of people in the HF world who are autistic or have Aspergers. The industry attracts a lot of these types because: (1) the job does not require as much human interaction as other jobs to be good at it; (2) it requires an obsessive focus on one singular task, and (3) and it is individual results-based, unlike most other jobs. In other words, it attracts a lot of people who lack the social skills to survive in the real world who can lock themselves in a office for days on end and can do singular research with laser-like focus and obsessiveness.
The problem with these types though is that a HF is still a business at the end of the day. So, in my experience, these people wind up being great analysts but have a hard time making the jump to the next level because they (1) lack the political skills to advance within their own firm (HFs are still a political organization and not the meritocracy they purport to be); and 2) they have a hard time scaling their fund outside of themselves because they can't deal with the people aspect of it (i.e., running and managing an organization, fundraising with outside investors).
That's said, these people usually make great analysts because they live outside the social norms of society so they are perfectly fine not following crowds where opinions might differ from consensus as long as they believe they are right. Specifically, they find a lot of success on the short side of the business because (1) you have to see things differently than others; (2) you can't be swayed by millions of other people telling you that you are wrong on a daily basis; and (3) short sellers need to do a level of work that is much deeper than long investors.
This is why I want to go to a HF
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