A scholarship student with no personal wealth, he organized venture capital from a group of private investors, recruited academic economists including Harry Markowitz, Paul Samuelson, and Robert Merton (all of whom would later win Nobel Prizes in Economics),[2] and founded Arbitrage Management Company (AMC), an idea he had while listening to a guest lecture from Professor John Shelton of UCLA (another founder of AMC).
Before graduation, he had raised $250,000 from private investors and hired professors and assistants to develop a computer program to trade Shelton's convertible arbitrage strategy.
After running a successful hedge fund to prove the efficacy of computerized trading, he sold the company to a NYSE member firm and resettled in London.
Recruiting a group of academic physicists, including Mitchell Feigenbaum, winner of the MacArthur grant and the Wolf Prize in Physics for his pioneering work in Chaos Theory, Numerix was founded in 1996.
[3] A lecturer at forums including the University of Chicago and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Goodkin is the author of the 1981 best-selling novel, Paper Gold,[4] and in 2012 he published his memoir The Wrong Answer Faster: The Inside Story of Making the Machine that Trades Trillions.