Capital Allocators · Monday, September 28, 2026
The firm where Nancy Zimmerman began her career, O'Connor and Associates, was intensely focused on the bottom-up, math-driven aspects of pricing options and derivatives. They were uninterested in macroeconomics, prioritizing the distribution of returns and the mechanics of price relationships.
“They were uninterested in macro or anything that wasn't bottom-up around pricing options or pricing derivatives.”
“So the big, big focus on the distribution of those prices. What does it mean? What are the outcomes? What's the risk? But it was very much from a bottom-up, math-driven kind of perspective.”
“They were brilliant. They were like, incredibly smart. But they were not investors. They were traders. They were risk managers. They were trying to make a bit of spread.”