Word: quant
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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...
...Dylans do deviate--once--from their formula of upbeat electric rockers. Sadly, the result is the monotonous "(Don't Cut Me Down) Mary Quant in Blue," which features an early eighties dance pop groove, a sound last heard on the $100 Yamaha Porta-Sound PSS-470 mini-keyboard that Uncle Harry gave me for Hanukah. So much for fancy production...
...which is the site of a major naval base and is now considered to be part of a national security zone, is normally a haven of tolerance where the police chief speaks English and local duty-free stores are filled with Burberry raincoats, Dunhill men's accessories, Mary Quant cosmetics, Pringle woolens, Johnnie Walker Scotch and other British goods. Writes McWhirter: "The mood of the town has begun to change along with the moving tides of war. Ushuaia's younger men have left their jobs to serve in the town's police reserves. Three British journalists have...