“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.”
--Warren Buffett
In March of 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an
opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a
poker tournament with million-dollar stakes, but those 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 earth. There too were Cliff Asness, the
sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR, a man as
famous for his computer-smashing rages as for his brilliance, and
Boaz Weinstein, chess life-master and king of the credit default
swap, who while juggling $30 billion worth of positions for
Deutsche Bank found time for frequent visits to Las Vegas with the
famed MIT card-counting team.
On that night in 2006, these four men and their cohorts 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 create 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 creating 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 story of what they thought and
felt in the days and weeks when they helplessly watched much of
their net worth vaporize – and wondered just how their mind-bending
formulas and genius-level IQ’s had led them so wrong, so
fast. Had their years of success been dumb luck, fool’s gold,
a good run that could come to an end on any given 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 story not just of these
men, but of Jim Simons, the reclusive founder of the most
successful hedge fund in history; Aaron Brown, the quant who used
his math skills to humiliate Wall Street’s old guard at their
trademark game of Liar’s Poker, and years later found 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 journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and hubris…and
an ominous warning about Wall Street’s future.
From the Hardcover edition.
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