Geek Love Endures on Wall Street
Despite the apparent reality that it's not possible to precisely quantify everything under the sun, particularly when it comes to human behavior, the worrisome trend of "quants" -- experts from physics and other scientific fields -- infiltrating Wall Street firms to apply their skills to the stock market is still in effect.
Despite the apparent reality that it’s not possible to precisely quantify everything under the sun, particularly when it comes to human behavior, the worrisome trend of “quants” — experts from physics and other scientific fields — infiltrating Wall Street firms to apply their skills to the stock market is still in effect.
WAIT BEFORE YOU GO...The New York Times:
This flood seems to be continuing, unabated by the ongoing economic collapse in this country and abroad. Last fall students filled a giant classroom at M.I.T. to overflowing for an evening workshop called “So You Want to Be a Quant.” Some quants analyze the stock market. Others churn out the computer models that analyze otherwise unmeasurable risks and profits of arcane deals, or run their own hedge funds and sift through vast universes of data for the slight disparities that can give them an edge.
Still others have opened an academic front, using complexity theory or artificial intelligence to better understand the behavior of humans in markets. In December the physics Web site arXiv.org, where physicists post their papers, added a section for papers on finance. Submissions on subjects like “the superstatistics of labor productivity” and “stochastic volatility models” have been streaming in.
This year, the ground feels uncertain — facts are buried and those in power are working to keep them hidden. Now more than ever, independent journalism must go beneath the surface.
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