Word: quant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...group, a head trader, he's never solved a quantitative problem before," says a 30-year-old Ph.D. at a leading brokerage house. "An important problem that could take you three weeks to solve properly, he'll want it done in two days. It's very difficult for a quant who thinks of himself as a Ph.D. from a top-notch school and comes to Wall Street, and a high school dropout screams at him and calls him an idiot." His colleague, an engineer, agrees: "Many times, what your boss is saying is just hilarious. It's wrong, you know...
...Wall Street and the quants are stuck with each other. Stanley Diller, 58, an early quant who is managing director of fixed-income research at Paine Webber, left a job as an economics professor at Columbia in the mid-'70s to join Goldman, Sachs & Co.'s equity-research department. In those days, he says, "research was largely an image builder. It was something that brought in the customers." Now quantitative research "is the whole deal." If you don't have it, says Diller, you can't produce the new financial instruments, " 'cause you get crushed trying to hedge them." Meaning...
Wall Street as the real world is a concept that could raise eyebrows. But some financial experts wonder whether the quants are weakening whatever contact with reality the street may have had. Steve Barnett, an anthropologist who is a principal of Global Business Network, a think tank, says that in the pre-quant days, Wall Street was patriarchal, intuitive, much more related to the world as it was. But hard-core quants, he complains across the generation gap, "are almost idiots savants with numbers . . . There is an almost prayerful communion with the computer. They're intense and operate...
...takes three to six months, says one quant who has made the transition, to change a shy, bookish type into a ruthless money-making machine. What's required, says this alumnus of the system, is "to lose your sense of decency. You have to be rude, brash, you have to be selfish. Also you have to start ignoring 90% of what you are told." He describes, perhaps admiringly, a vulnerable Ph.D. from Princeton University. This fellow wore $50 suits and thick glasses. He was painfully polite. Transformed, he became the quant from Hell. "He's got this personality suddenly...
...somewhat glum conclusion: "So wait till the Generation Y quant people hit Wall Street." When this occurs, at least one Generation X precept is unlikely to be disproved. As one quant said last week, "If you make money, ) nobody calls you a geek...