The View from the Office.

I met up with Paul Besson for breakfast at Pecora Bianca across from Bryant Park. Paul had the granola and berries; I had the scrambled eggs and potatoes.

Paul is the head of quant research at Euronext, where he manages a team of eight people who write analysis about markets from FX to equities.

We first met a decade ago when I visited him while he worked at Kepler Cheuvreux in Paris. He had asked to use Bloomberg data to determine whether news sentiment could generate alpha.

Paul is a polymath who bounces from topic to topic with abandon and glee. We started talking about some of John Steinbeck’s less famous books before focusing on the recent outperformance of U.S. equities, trends in retail stock trading in India, market matching mechanisms and platform economics.

“People don’t pay enough attention to market innovation as they should,” he said. “There is a revolution going on in big assets, especially equities.”

He sprinkled book recommendations throughout, urging me to pick up Capitalism in America by Alan Greenspan. (Amazingly, Greenspan was 92 when he wrote that!) 

Paul lives in Paris but tries to get over to America on a regular basis both because the landscape here is so dynamic and because there is nothing like taking the pulse in person.

He started this trip in Chicago and, on top of business meetings, he also met with Eric Budish, a professor at the University of Chicago who does research on market design.

Paul said there is a lot of innovation going on in alternative trading systems. He mentioned half a dozen people to follow and especially the new U.S. innovative exchanges he studies. 

As we packed up to go, Paul kept remembering more people I should meet, such as Sasha Stoikov, a senior research associate at Cornell who studies market microstructure, high-frequency trading, and the dynamics of limit order books. 

Sasha, he added, also founded a startup called Piki, which is both a music recommendation engine and a social platform that helps users discover live music in NYC. 

Paul’s enthusiasm made it clear just how much he loved the fact that one person was working on both a music startup and the dynamics of limit order books. 

Paul can be reached via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.