David Gershon, CEO, SuperDerivatives

Before 1992, David Gershon didn't know the difference between bonds and equities, so to have set up a company that revolutionized the pricing of currency options less than a decade later is no mean feat. Gershon left school with the dream of becoming a professor of physics and spent most of his twenties gaining a number of impressive academic accolades. His PhD was in superstring theory. "This theory was first developed in 1981. It gained popularity throughout the 1980s as the first theory that could unify all the forces in nature, which is why it is sometimes called the theory of everything," he says. "It's a beautiful idea but unfortunately to me it looked like it was reaching a dead end with its ambitious role to 'replace the need in God'. It had too many unknowns and ambiguities." While writing his thesis, Gershon completed an MBA and began increasingly to think about finance. Eventually, he decided to switch disciplines and joined the graduate programme of finance at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Very quickly he started to get offers to do consultancy work, one of which took him to the mortgages department of NationsBank. Soon after, he received job offers from Wall Street firms and he moved to New York in 1994. "At the time there was a fair amount of demand for people with experience in mathematics and physics," he says. Gershon then traded FX at Deutsche Bank and Barclays Capital, covering emerging markets. He later transferred to Barclays' head office in London, where he was global head of FX options. In 2000, he left Barclays and set up SuperDerivatives. "SuperDerivatives' initial mission, which remains its aim today, was to help thousands of people already and potentially involved in options to obtain real market prices rather than just theoretical values," he says.