The Quants

Hedging the bet.

I can't figure if Bloomberg has an RSS feed on their news, or can't find it so couldn't share this quickie on the reader list on the right. So here goes...

There's an interesting article (quite long) peering into the mysterious world of one hedge fund with automated quantitative trading strategies (or in other words, mathematicians and statisticians data mining trading data to come up with algorithms on how and what to trade).

It is quite a success story, founded by an ex-maths professor who laments at the state of maths education with qualified math and science teachers getting sucked into the private sector due to poor pay. He himself is apparently making hundreds of millions with his NSA acquired code cracking skills with a company he founded that is made by and for scientists. One commenter says their secret is never hiring an MBA :-D

Worth a read: Simons at Renaissance Cracks Code, Doubling Assets

The laws of the financial markets present a special challenge, Simons says. Unlike the laws governing physics or chemistry, they tend to change over time. ``One can predict the course of a comet more easily than one can predict the course of Citigroup's stock,'' he says. ``The attractiveness, of course, is that you can make more money successfully predicting a stock than you can a comet.''