The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

by Scott Patterson

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. 

In March of 2006, four of 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.  
 
On that night, 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 helped create a digitized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe with the click of a mouse. Few realized, 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. 

• ISBN10: 0307453383
• ISBN13: 9780307453389
• Publish Date: 25 January 2011 (first published 1 January 2010)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Currency
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 352
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780307453389

Reviews

[remo]

Este libro explica un montón de cosas sobre la crisis de 2008, entrando tras un montón de puertas que yo creía que siempre habían estado cerradas. Es una lectura muy interesanet y muy bien llevada sobre cómo afectó el crack a los hedge funds, fondos de inversión sin reglas escritas sobre cómo invertir el dinero. Fondos de inversión discrecionales, podríamos llamarlos. En ellos, los más afamados traders se llevan cada año el 2% de lo que gestionan y el 20% de lo que ganan, operando en mercados guiados por alta matemática que busca pequeñas discrepancias en los mercados o bien tendencias que nadie más ha visto para obtener beneficios.
El libro comienza narrando las vidas de los principales managers de hedge funds, cómo se conocieron y formaron, cómo lanzarosn sus fondos, y cómo todos se pegaron la gran galleta en 2007, 2008, 2009 y subsiguientes.
El libro destroza la hipótesis de Fama de los mercados eficientes y cuenta un montón de cosas interesantes. Tiene algunos fallos de bulto, como cuando describe el carry trade (estás largo de yenes, no corto, cenutrio) y alguna otra, pero en general se lee muy bien.