Former Deutsche Bank Trader Greg Lippmann Has A Few Things He'd Like To Get Off His Chest
First off, Greg doesn't want to be famous and he says he's "looking forward to being anonymous again." The be-sideburned trader (in Greg Zuckerman's The Greatest Trade Ever his 'burns are described as "unusually long and thick" and in Michael Lewis's The Big Short as those of a "1970s porn star") announced this desire in a recent profile with which he not only cooperated but sat for on two separated occasions and spoke on the record, the genius of which is yet to reveal itself. Second, those hilarious "I'm short your house" shirts he had made back in '06 when he was one of the few making hugely bearish bets on the housing market? He didn't come up with that tag-line. "It's juvenile. It's funny in March of '06 when everybody calls you Chicken Little. It's not funny now," he told the Observer. "It wasn't my idea—that's a fact, on my kids' lives. ... I definitely did not, on my kids lives. Somebody gave it to me." Third, to those who think Lippmann comes off as "dickish" in Zuckerman and Lewis's narratives, that's just plain wrong.
"I think 'dickish' is the wrong word," Mr. Brettschneider, [his partner at, Libre Max, the hedge fund he's about to launch] who speaks in a soft Canadian accent, said. "Just to finish that," Mr. Lippmann added. "If you're a die-hard Yankee fan, and you meet someone who's a die-hard Red Sox fan, there's an initial 'He's a dick,' right? Because he likes the Red Sox and I like the Yankees. So the people that were rabidly bullish about this, that had invested their own careers on the opposite of me, it's natural they'd be like, 'Well, that guy's a dick, because he disagrees with me. He's not a dick for any credible reason. He's a dick because I don't like his opinion.'"
And finally, if you're desperate for a sushi rec, you can still come to old Greggy, known as much for his 'burns and bets as his Sushi Spreadsheet, though he personally does not partake in much raw fish consumption these days.
He isn't dispensing as much Japanese restaurant advice, either. "I still update the spreadsheet, because people ask me to." But in fact, he's not eating much sushi anymore. "One, I don't want to eat bluefin, because it's a terrible thing," he said. "And then, separately: mercury."
Mr. Bubble Bounces Back [NYO]