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

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent NY hotel. They were getting ready to compete inside a poker competition with ­million-dollar stakes. At the credit card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge account called PDT. With him was Ken Griffin, who was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group. There, as well, were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder from the hedge account AQR Capital Administration, and Boaz Weinstein, chess “ about The Quants: What sort of New Variety of Mathematics Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Almost Destroyed It existence get better at” and ruler from the credit-default swap.

Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein were one of the better and brightest of a fresh breed, the quants. Within the last twenty years, this varieties of math whiz acquired usurped the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk takers who’d always been the alpha men from the world’s largest modern casino. The quants thought that a cocktail of differential calculus, quantum physics, and advanced geometry kept the key to reaping riches from the financial markets. And they helped produce a digitized money-trading machine that could change ­billions around the globe using the click of a mouse. Few noticed that night time, though, that in creating this amazing system, males like Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein experienced sown the seeds for history’s greatest financial disaster.