The Quants – Too Incredible to Make Up
Details are finally beginning to emerge on just how things spun out of control on Wall Street so quickly back in 2007. A new book due out in February by the Wall Street Journal’s Scott Patterson, shines a light on a highly profitable but little understood segment of trading that for years had essentially ‘printed money’ for the large Wall Street investment banks.
Run by a core of Math Whiz kids using supercomputers and complicated mathmatical formulas and pimped to the bank executives by high powered brokers and investment fund managers – it was a meltdown looking for a place to happen and when it did, those responsible were powerless to stop it.
You could not make this stuff up – as Tom Clancy once said, the difference between writing fiction and non fiction is that fiction has to be believable!
