Meditate on This: Investing in Spirituality

In the Showtime television series Billions, both Bobby Axelrod, the gazillionaire hedge fund manager modeled on Steven Cohen, and canny U.S. attorney Chuck Rhoades, who is obsessively looking for clues to Axelrod’s insider trading, are seen practicing meditation.

Eyes softly closed, chests slowly rising and falling, the two alpha males take a few minutes of quiet time from their manic days of trying to outwit one another with intellect, deception, and brute force. A mindfulness practitioner might wince at the idea that an unscrupulous hedge fund manager or a crime fighter battling more personal demons than public ones could exploit a centuries-old practice to ignite their creativity.

但是，随着市场变得更有效率，回报也越来越难找到，也许也难怪学会专注于呼吸和当下，可能会被用于打击市场或抓获罪犯的合法和非法手段。亿万的编剧通过将内观（一种来自印度的古老冥想技巧，在美国被嬉皮士所接受）编入一个关于金融的系列中，激发出复杂的情感。

A spokesman for Point72 Asset Management, Cohen’s family office, declined to comment about the Billions character resembling him. While after a long-running government investigation Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors pleaded guilty to insider trading charges in 2014, Cohen was not convicted of any criminal wrongdoing.

Scandal and TV aside, some financiers have shown themselves eager to meditate.

At the Milken Institute Global Conference this year in Los Angeles, it was standing-room only at a workshop on using the practice to expand one’s capacity for compassion. Among the panel’s spiritual glitterati was Sharon Salzberg, who studied meditation for three years in India before returning to the U.S. in 1974 to teach it. In 1976 she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.

萨尔茨伯格曾与达赖喇嘛同台演出，他向首席投资官、投资组合经理、经济学家、私人股本投资者、顾问和风险资本家讲述了冥想早期遭遇哈欠、怀疑和可能进行药检的故事。

The workshop was moderated by Suze Yalof Schwartz, who recently moved to L.A. from New York to open and run a for-profit meditation studio. The panelists talked about the success meditation is having in everything from stemming youth violence to healing traumatic stress. Some of their remarks underscored how meditation — like finance, medical care, and almost every other professional field — is being fundamentally changed by data and research.

小组成员詹姆斯多蒂是一位神经外科教授，也是斯坦福大学同情和利他主义研究与教育中心的主任，他谈到了为绘制瑜伽和其他练习对大脑结构影响的图表所做的工作。一切都很好。不过，有些研究有点深奥，而且，嗯，有利可图。多蒂慈悲中心最近的一项研究着眼于神经情感机制以及它们如何预测市场层面的小额贷款。积极的行为如何影响你是否得到贷款。

和萨尔茨伯格一样，小组成员鲍勃罗斯（Bob Roth）也是曾经与众不同的冥想界的长期名人。他笑出大声有趣的时间，他花了古怪的传教冥想在他发现的早期几年，以及他的父母对他选择的道路失望。罗斯现在是大卫林奇基金会（davidlynchfoundation）的首席执行官，该基金会的成立是为了鼓励孩子们冥想，现在为安静时间等项目提供资金。

Quiet Time is intended for low-income urban schools and provides two 15-minute periods of Transcendental Meditation to help young people lower stress and address the academic underperformance that can result from it. The program has found success in reducing teacher turnover and suspensions while increasing test scores.

Roth no longer has to do the evangelizing. The David Lynch Foundation’s board has several believers from the finance world, including Robert Jones, chairman of System Two Advisors and founder of the global quantitative equity group at Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Other board members include David Ford, a founding partner and co-portfolio manager of Latigo Partners, and Nigol Koulajian, the founder and CIO of Quest Partners, a quantitative hedge fund in New York.

David Lynch, the award-winning director of films includingBlue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, says on his foundation’s website that he started Transcendental Meditation in 1973. He describes it as “life changing for the good.”

There may be plenty of other believers in the making. The workshop at the Milken Institute conference included a short meditation session for the packed room. After attendees followed their collective breath from their bellies to the tops of their heads, attempting to clear the detritus of previous sessions from their minds, they headed for the coffee and free protein bars.

Then, after complaining just a tiny bit about the lack of food at the conference, they collected cards for a free session at Schwartz’s Unplug Meditation and talked, softly, about the possible investment opportunities in spirituality.