The Quants

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

By: Scott Patterson

Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain

Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's summary

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken Griffin, who was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group. There, too, were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, and Boaz Weinstein, chess “life master” and king of the credit-default swap.

Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein were among the best and brightest of a new breed, the quants. Over the past 20 years, this species of math whiz had usurped the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk takers who’d long been the alpha males of the world’s largest casino. The quants believed that a cocktail of differential calculus, quantum physics, and advanced geometry held the key to reaping riches from the financial markets. And they helped create a digitized money-trading machine that could shift ­billions around the globe with the click of a mouse. Few realized that night, though, that in creating this extraordinary system, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein had sown the seeds for history’s greatest financial disaster.

©2010 Scott Patterson (P)2010 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Scott Patterson has the ability to see things you and I don't notice. He does an admirable job of debunking the myths of black box traders and provides a very entertaining narrative in the process." (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, New York Times best-selling author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan)

interesting historical account

provides an interesting description of the major players and the history of quantitative finance. however it is very light on mathematical insight.

great listen. I

great topic. history. the order of the chapters by the big players was great for an audiobook.