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

With the immediacy of todays 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 Streets future.In March of 2006, four of the worlds richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with milliondollar 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 whiztechnocrats who make billions not with gut calls or fundamental analysis but with formulas and highspeed computershad usurped the testosteronefueled, killorbekilled risktakers whod long been the alpha males the worlds largest casino. The quants helped create a digitized moneytrading 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 historys greatest financial disaster.Drawing on unprecedented access to these four numbercrunching 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 vaporizeand wondered just how their mindbending formulas and geniuslevel IQs had led them so wrong, so fast.