The Quants Quotes

“Insiders say the pressure to succeed at Renaissance can be brutal. One mathematician at the fund may have succumbed to the pressure on March 1, 2006. That’s when Alexander Astashkevich, a thirty-seven-year-old MIT graduate who worked at Renaissance, shot and killed his estranged wife in the small town of Port Jefferson, Long Island, before turning the shotgun on himself. He left behind a six-year-old son named Arthur.”
― Scott Patterson, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

“the company seemed different after the IPO, less hungry, less energetic, less creative.”
― Scott Patterson, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

“People assume that if they use higher mathematics and computer models they’re doing the Lord’s work,” observed Buffett’s longtime partner, the cerebral Charlie Munger. “They’re usually doing the devil’s work.”
― Scott Patterson, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

“Regulators lent a helping hand. On a spring afternoon in late April 2004, five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission gathered in a basement hearing room to meet a contingent of representatives from Wall Street’s big investment banks to talk about risk. The banks had asked for an exemption for their brokerage units from a regulation that limited the amount of debt they could hold on their balance sheets. The rule required banks to hold a large reserve of cash as a cushion against big losses on those holdings. By loosening up these so-called capital reserve requirements, the banks could become more aggressive and deploy the extra cash in other, more lucrative areas—such as mortgage-backed securities and derivatives.”
― Scott Patterson, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It