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

by Scott Patterson

How would you feel if you outperformed the market, year after year? Would you become convinced that the good times were here to stay, that nothing could possibly go wrong? And how would you then feel if everything suddenly collapsed around you? Quants - quantitative analysts - were the maths geniuses let loose in Wall Street's candy store, and this gripping narrative of talent and ambition follows their dizzying rise from the bottom of the Street's pecking order to its pinnacle. Their ascent was predicated on the belief that they had invented - and were fine-tuning - brilliant and impregnable computer programs that would always beat the market. Unfortunately, as the events of 2007 and 2008 showed all too clearly, these programs turned out to be ticking time bombs. The story actually begins in the early 1960s, when a successful maths-professor-turned-gambler named Ed Thorp realised that skills learned at the Vegas tables could also be applied to the financial markets. He soon acquired followers and imitators who, over the next few decades, assumed positions of ever-greater power and influence.
Clever, eccentric, often larger than life, they achieved extraordinary success and massive wealth. "The Quants" follows them from obscurity to boom and then to bust, explaining why they were so self-confident, and how they got it so disastrously wrong.

• ISBN10: 0307453391
• ISBN13: 9780307453396
• Publish Date: 2 February 2010 (first published 1 January 2010)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Crown Business
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 228
• Language: English

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.