The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It
Where to buy The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Ruined It books online?
- ISBN13: 9780307453372
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
“Beware of geeks impact formulas.”
–Warren Buffett
In March of 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an luxurious New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with million-dollar stakes, but persons numbers meant nothing to them. They were accustomed to risking billions.
At the card table that night was Peter Muller, an eccentric, whip-smart whiz kid who’d studied theoretical mathematics at Princeton and now managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT…when he wasn’t playing his keyboard for morning commuters on the New York subway. With him was Ken Griffin, who as an undergraduate trading convertible bonds out of his Harvard dorm room had outsmarted the Wall Street pros and made money in one of the worst bear markets of all time. Now he was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group, one of the most powerful money machines on planet. There too were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR, a man as legendary for his computer-smashing rages as for his brilliance, and Boaz Weinstein, chess life-master and king of the credit defaulting swap, who while juggling $30 billion worth of positions for Deutsche Bank establish time for frequent visits to Las Vegas with the famed MIT card-counting team.
On that night in 2006, these four men and their allies were the new kings of Wall Street. Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein were among the best and brightest of a new breed, the quants. Over the prior twenty years, this species of math whiz –technocrats who make billions not with gut calls or fundamental analysis but with formulas and high-speed computers– had usurped the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk-takers who’d long been the alpha males the world’s largest casino. The quants believed that a dizzying, indecipherable-to-mere-mortals cocktail of differential calculus, quantum physics, and advanced geometry held the key to reaping riches from the financial markets. And they helped make a digitized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe with the click of a mouse.
Few realized that night, though, that in making this unprecedented machine, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness and Weinstein had sowed the seeds for history’s greatest financial disaster.
Drawing on unprecedented access to these four number-crunching titans, The Quants tells the inside tale of what they thought and felt in the days and weeks when they feebly watched much of their net worth vaporize – and wondered just how their mind-bending formulas and genius-level IQ’s had led them so incorrect, so quick. Had their years of success been dumb luck, fool’s gold, a excellent run that could come to an end on any agreed day? What if The Truth they sought — the secret of the markets — wasn’t knowable? Worse, what if there wasn’t any Truth?
In The Quants, Scott Patterson tells the tale not just of these men, but of Jim Simons, the ascetic founder of the most successful hedge fund in history; Aaron Brown, the quant who used his math skills to humiliate Wall Street’s ancient guard at their trademark game of Liar’s Poker, and years later establish himself with a front-row seat to the rapid emergence of mortgage-backed securities; and gadflies and dissenters such as Paul Wilmott, Nassim Taleb, and Benoit Mandelbrot.
With the immediacy of today’s NASDAQ close and the timeless power of a Greek tragedy, The Quants is at once a masterpiece of explanatory television journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and hubris…and an ominous warning about Wall Street’s future.
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I bought my Kindle to read books at $9.99. At some point purchasing books at that fee would offset the initial buy of a piece of hardware with a restricted life expectancy. The fact that this book is nearly $15 is a disappointment considering that I’ve had it on my Kindle wish list for some time. I’ll be removing that now and waiting for this book to be available from the library.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Very disappointed that it would cost me MORE to buy for the kindle than if I bought the dead tree version.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I would have very likely bought this to read, but will now pass since the kindle edition is more expensive than the actual physical edition. This makes no sense at all. No paper to process, print or bind. No heavy books to ship. The publishers need to join the 21st. century and embrace the new medium. The ebook (which ever format becomes the industry standard) is not the demise of publishing, but its salvation.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
In reviewing any product, value is a consideration. At this fee, the value is poor.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Granted, investing or trading in today’s market requires knowledge of volatility, but we certainly don’t need more government “help” to come in an make it worse than they have already done. One has be be reliable for their own investment decisions, whether daytrading, fleeting-term, or long-term….any of these possible with automated computerized setups. We don’t need more crying to the government for help because a name got burned for their lack of knowledge. Either study to figure out how the markets work, or do something else with your money. Quants didn’t ruin your 401k…you did when you choose to place your money there.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5