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  • The Quants

  • How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It
  • By: Scott Patterson
  • Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
  • Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (49 ratings)

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The Quants

By: Scott Patterson
Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
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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

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 bestselling author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan)

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B+

The writing in the first chapter or so was very average. After that it improved markedly.
Minor points - Listing possessions isn't telling a story and if I ever hear "beyond their wildest dreams" again I'll choke.

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interesting... last chapter most informative

insider perspective... I like Flash Boys perspective better but that is just a matter of opinion. well written and interesting anecdotes

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