Sometime in the early 1970s, a young Rick Rieder sat in his elementary school cafeteria, not eating. Instead, he stared at his lunch money—a quarter—and weighed the probability of an Oakland Raiders victory. He would obsess over microdata, like how the football team played on turf versus grass, searching for a marginal edge that would turn his 25 cents into fifty. Then, he’d bet. When he lost, he went hungry, he told podcaster and author William Green.
That hunger never really went away. He told Green he “gets grumpy during bull markets,” and prefers when the market loses its nerve. Now chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock, Rieder has what he admits is a “maniacal” obsession with data that helps him to pick through the wreckage, find the arbitrage, or get out early. “The whole gig,” he said, is managing risk well enough to know when it is time to leave.
