About 72 Seconds.com
72 Seconds is a Sunday Times Magazine kind of web log. 80% of the time, it is a photo-blog. However, The site also includes the odd enry on other things such as emergence theory, enterprise blogging, knowledge workers, innovation creators, internal entrepreneurs, economics, politics, credit derivatives, Movable Type, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and painting.
About Rod Boothby
I live in San Francisco with my wife, Cindy, our dog Johnny and an angry cat called Bo.
Contact Information
You can also reach me through LinkedIn
Career
I am a Manager with Ernst & Young's Financial Services Advisory practice. I focus on helping our clients deal with:
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Pricing and trading Credit Derivatives, CDOs, CDS indices, bespoke tranches & Fixed Income Derivatives.
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Organization design and strategy issues related to risk management and derivatives trading operations.
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Technology infrastructure design, vendor selection and build out.
Thanks to a kind introduction from Dr. Robbie Jones, I was able to start my career out of grad school at Wells Fargo’s famed Management Sciences Dept. Notable alumni of the department include Oldrich Vasicek, who went on to become the V in KMV.
In a stroke of luck, I arrived just as a new fixed income derivatives trading desk was being set up. I was a member of the founding team that set up the Financial Products group, and spent 2 years working as an assistant trader and building out trading and VaR systems. In 1999, I left Wells to work for Integral Development Corp., and then spent a year working on my own start-up. Then went back to Wells Fargo to work in Credit Risk Architecture before joining Ernst & Young's Financial Services Advisory practice in 2004.
Innovation Creators and Enterprise Blogging
I run a web site called Innovation Creators.
InnovationCreators has a simple three part message:
- Companies must become innovation engines to prosper
- Knowledge workers must become innovative creators
- Well structured enterprise blogs can help make this happen
Check it out and let me know what you think
Career Related Areas of Interest and Expertise
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Credit Derivatives - my key specialty has been specifically focusing on how to estimate, simulate and price correlation, including implied Gaussian copula correlation, and default intensity correlation. As 72 Seconds evolves, I hope to post the occasional tutorial and how-to spreadsheet on these topics.
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Trading systems and technology. Calypso, Murex, C++, C#, Java, UNIX, XML/XSD and VBA.
Education
Stanford University, GSB, Credit Risk Modeling Executive Education Program
MA in Economics from Simon Fraser University
BA (Honors) in Economics from Queen's University
Painting
I was trained by Monet, Van Gogh, Turner... or at least I learnt everything I know from staring at their paintings.
I have been inspired by my brother, Alex Boothby, and by some of Canada’s greatest professional artists, all of whom are part of Drawnonward: Paul Mantrop, Gordon Kemp, Rob Saley, Steve McDonald, Chris Roberts, and David Marshak. The strange thing is that I went to high school with most of Drawnonward.
My painting began as a desperate attempt to overcome a complete lack of money. In 2001, I had spent a year trying to start a technology company, and ended up not having enough in the bank to buy a cup of tea. I wanted to give my girlfriend, Cindy (we are now married) something nice for Christmas. For some reason I became convinced I could paint her a picture of the first house we lived in together. I hadn’t painted since an art class in grade 8. Using what little space was left on my credit card, I got a disposable camera to take a picture of that beaten down moldy old cottage, and bought a canvas, a starter’s painting kit that came with 4 brushes and about 12 tubes of oil paint. From one of the photos, I carefully measured out the dimensions of the house, and scaled them up to points on the canvas. I connected these points with pencil lines, and then started painting. The whole thing took about a week.
Photography
For our first anniversary, Cindy bought me a Digital Rebel.
Around the time that Google bought Picasa, I figured out that the “I’m feeling Lucky” button made photos taken out of a plane windows look beautiful.
Then, I found Heather Champ’s amazing site, and have recently being trying to understand the mesmerizing magic behind David J. Nightingale’s beautiful chromasia.
Applied Economics and Emergent Systems
A short while ago, I picked up a book in Stacy’s entitled Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson. It is incredibly interesting.
Emergence is the process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules. The study of free market economics is one unwitting example of the study of emergence.
I am interested in how the study of emergent systems can inform approaches to managing a company in ways that generate powerful new patterns of innovation. What makes the agents in an emergent system become more innovative? Beyond creating incentive structures, what communication infrastructures are required to encourage employees to behave in a way that significantly increases the probability of generating group and company wide patterns and approaches that represent novel solutions?