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John Coates

Senior Research Fellow in Neuroscience and Finance

MPhil, PhD (Univ. of Cambridge)

Professional Experience

After completing his PhD, John Coates worked for Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, trading derivatives. He then ran a derivatives trading desk for Deutsche Bank New York, a desk specialised in short dated options, swaptions, and exotic derivatives. He developed techniques for valuing and arbitraging the tails of probability distributions, and for trading low probability events such financial crises.

Dr Coates's experience with market crises, such as Black Monday, the Asian Financial Crisis, the Dot.com Bubble, allowed him to observe first-hand the powerful emotions driving traders during these tail events. In order to better understand market sentiment he looked to behavioural economics and ultimately to neuroscience and endocrinology. He returned to Cambridge in 2004 to test a hypothesis he had developed while working on Wall Street - that endogenous steroids were shifting risk-preferences systematically across the market cycle, exaggerating the peaks and troughs. He now works closely with the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience on a research project focused on the endocrine system and financial risk taking.

Research Interests

John Coates is a member of the Finance & Accounting research group and the Finance & Accounting teaching group.

Selected Publications

Coates, J. (1996) The claims of common sense: Moore, Wittgenstein, Keynes and the social sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Coates, J. and Herbert, J. (2008) "Endogenous steroids and financial risk-taking on a London trading floor." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(16): 6167-6172 (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0704025105)

Coates, J.M. (2009) "Reply to Millet: Digit ratios and high frequency trading." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(11): E31-E31 (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0900882106)

Coates, J.M. (2009) "Second-to-fourth digit ratio predicts success among high-frequency financial traders." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(2): 623-628 (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0810907106)