Page 19 - Initial Public Offering - An Introduction to IPO on Wall Street

a word from his mentor

Marc René DESCHENAUX is the incarnation of the financial Genius.
Born from a single mother in the sixties, he was raised by his grand-father René DESCHENAUX a
bank employee who has been president of both the Caisse Raiffeisen and of the insurance
Chrétienne Sociale of Chêne-Bourg, a Geneva suburb, as well as of the ancient Geneva Stock
Exchange, while working as a simple employee at Swiss Bank Corporation in the securities coupon
department.

Marc René DESCHENAUX was doing interest rates calculations by age 7 and portfolio
computations by age 9 on a mechanic calculator that did not feature multiplication and division
functions!

Growing-up he received a Texas Instrument 59 calculator that taught him machine language, as one
very special birthday gift from his grand-father. Marc worked hard doing little jobs and importing
citizen band 27Mhz transmitters-receivers and talkie-walkies, to buy a second hand Commodore
PET 2000 computer featuring a 6502 microprocessor, his true first microcomputer.

At age 11, he was sent to a catholic boarding school Collège Saint-Louis in Corsier Geneva for
several years. He studied in Latin section. His grand-father died on the first day of his last year.
Marc never recovered of his loss.

He developed software games and made enough money to pay for his own studies, first in
electronics and data processing, in finance and financing, securities and commodities, futures and
options, trading and pledging and finally in law and regulation.

His obsession for freedom in all sense of the words pushed him in studying finance, financing,
complex corporate schemes, econometrics, leverage, equities, economics and attempting to mix
quantum rules he always had a problem in understanding, to these various fields.

My purpose is not to write his detailed story, which would use another book, but to make the reader
understand that at the time kids study letters and numbers, Marc was calculating financial portfolios
for a rural saving & loan and at the time they were performing their first mathematical operations,
he was programming computers in machine language. When his contemporaries were still at
secondary school, he was a professional autodidact.

Later, in the middle of the eighties, two years before Jordan Belfort was hired by L.F. Rothschild
as a securities representative for less than a month, let alone calling him the “Wolf of Wall Street”,
Marc’s friends and colleagues called him “The Eagle of Wall Street”.

This started as a joke because Marc was flying between New York and Geneva where he had his
“nest” and because according to them, he was not really a Wall Street insider, but had more of a
view from above on the market.

Over time, it became a mark of respect because of its extraordinarily accurate financial vision on
the United States financial markets and creativity in legal strategy and schemes.

No wonder if today, he is the World Master of Experts in securities markets laws and regulations,
finance, financings and econometrics.

He has been by far the most brilliant of my mentees and students.

Thomas J. March

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