Os limites da análise financeira quantitativa

THE QUANTS

How A New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

By Scott Patterson

Twenty-five years ago, the quintessential Wall Street trader was a brash, ballsy risk taker whose actions were motivated by gut instinct and social connections. But in the decades since, the proverbial “gut trader” has been supplanted by a new breed of investor, elite math geniuses—ex-cryptographers, physicists, and game theorists—who’ve swapped old-style hunches for complicated algorithms and supercomputers. Scott Patterson’s forthcoming book: The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It (Crown Business; On sale: February 2, 2010) chronicles the story of the quants’ rise, their near-death experience, and their possible against-all-odds resurgence. The “quants” have become the masters of the Wall Street universe, although their grip on power has grown precarious due to their role in setting off a chain of events that nearly destroyed the world’s financial markets.
THE QUANTS profiles the incredible upward ascent of four of the quant elite’s most swashbuckling figures—Peter Muller, Ken Griffin, Cliff Asness, and Boaz Weinstein—men who 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. These men also created a digitized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe with the click of a mouse. For a while it seemed as though they’d continue earning gargantuan paydays forever. Then came the day the numbers turned against them. . . .
Drawing on unprecedented access to these four number-crunching titans, Patterson tells the inside story of what these men 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, 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?
Leia mais: /http://crownpublishing.com/2010/01/12/press-release-the-quants-by-scott-patterson/
backgrounder: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aMRiMr8h44tg