In the past couple months I've become absolutely fascinated with high frequency trading. I wrote this about it's skilled practitioner: the quant.
Rise Of The Quant | Trend/Peek
Rise Of The Quant | Trend/Peek
Rise Of The Quant - High Frequency Trading
- Thread starter Enigmabomb
- Start date
Also, for further reading, this piece from the Times today was very good: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/business/02speed.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hpw
Spent my New Year's Eve with a bunch of guys doing this in London.
All interesting stuff, but I came away quite sad that obviously talented, technical people are being sucked into relatively trivial, albeit profitable, endeavours simply due to leverage and the undue gravity it gives to the financial sector. Of course, the very smartest guys are still in academia but the level below, who often would become highly competent industry leaders, designers and entrepreneurs are going into The City (or Wall Street) instead.
But of course, this has been going on for 20-30 years.
All interesting stuff, but I came away quite sad that obviously talented, technical people are being sucked into relatively trivial, albeit profitable, endeavours simply due to leverage and the undue gravity it gives to the financial sector. Of course, the very smartest guys are still in academia but the level below, who often would become highly competent industry leaders, designers and entrepreneurs are going into The City (or Wall Street) instead.
But of course, this has been going on for 20-30 years.
Friend just sent me this link a couple hours ago.
Haven't seen it yet, but he told me...
... these guys are the programmers who built the financial products that almost took down Wall St.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed2FWNWwE3I]YouTube - Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street (Marije Meerman, VPRO Backlight 2010)[/ame]
Haven't seen it yet, but he told me...
... these guys are the programmers who built the financial products that almost took down Wall St.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed2FWNWwE3I]YouTube - Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street (Marije Meerman, VPRO Backlight 2010)[/ame]
Where do they go?
I'm speaking solely from my own experience, but the smartest guys on my courses certainly stayed in academia. Mostly they looked down on the finance route as beneath them and that seemed to be true for most academics. When I was graduating though, CERN was being built and finance was intent on shooting itself in the face so that might have had an effect.
But the joke was that there's always structured finance if you mess up your PHD- "solving differential equations for money".
Enigma, yeah pretty much right. The chat, when we weren't talking work stories, was about defining 'New Year' , MMORPGs and philosophy, hich might give you some idea. I mean you can go into any good university and any Maths/Physics/Comp Sci department and find the people we're talking about.
best yet is if you know the math, and know the financial side, you can really do some damage. I know the math and am getting better at the finance side, the math is fun stuff..I've used MATLAB to plot some daily stock trends for fun and it actually comes out semi-accurate.
As the saying goes, "those who can do, do. Those who can't, teach." The smartest guys generally end up in the private sector making billions, not stuck in academia making $90k/year.
Don't discount the idealists who really do think "making money" is somehow a dirty thing.
Yeah it's a generalization because there are some very brilliant people who care nothing about money and simply want to advance learning. But I would say they're outnumbered by the brilliant people that go out to make a fortune for themselves and/or others.
Ironically, Quants make peanuts compared to the traders of old. They still run circles around academia, but still...
Right.
But don't judge them too harshly, it's only thanks to people like that that humanity is in the position it's in now.
Prime example being Tim Berners-Lee, not acting for profit on his own behalf but has enabled every single one of us to earn our living in the way that we do.
The South African guy's book is a pretty good read. [ame=http://www.amazon.com/My-Life-Quant-Reflections-Physics/dp/0471394203]Amazon.com: My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance (0723812213009): Emanuel Derman: Books[/ame]
