The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It by Scott Patterson

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

by Scott Patterson

View on Goodreads
Business & Finance

When every fund's model points to the same trade, you don't have diversification anymore, you have a crowd. Patterson follows four quants, Peter Muller, Ken Griffin, Cliff Asness and Boaz Weinstein, from their rise on Wall Street to the summer of 2007, when their nearly identical positions started unwinding together.

Core ideas
  • The Truth: The book's shorthand for the quants' faith in a hidden rational order beneath prices, and their models underestimated volatility.
  • Card counting first: Ed Thorp carried the math of his 1962 blackjack system into the stock market, and the book casts him as the godfather of quant investing.
  • A warning on record: Long-Term Capital Management's 1998 collapse was already the cautionary tale when crowded quant trades broke down in 2007.
Published2010
Pages337
ISBN9780307453372
ReadJan 2026

Connected to 7 other books

See the connection map
The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman The Man Who Solved the Market Gregory Zuckerman Read Jul 2026 Most of what you learn about investing says to understand the business. The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind The Smartest Guys in the Room Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind Read Jul 2026 Enron's business was largely an illusion, and a lot of smart people were paid well not to look closely. The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy by Christopher Leonard The Lords of Easy Money Christopher Leonard Read May 2026 When the Fed creates money, you'd assume it reaches the economy you live in. How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy How Markets Fail John Cassidy Read Mar 2024 At their best, markets let people trade to mutual benefit, the ideal economists call Pareto efficiency. Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright, Bradley Hope Billion Dollar Whale Tom Wright, Bradley Hope Read Jun 2026 How do you take roughly $4.5 billion out of a sovereign wealth fund in plain sight? Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux Number Go Up Zeke Faux Read Aug 2025 Crypto prices rose because people bought, and people bought because prices rose. On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver On the Edge Nate Silver Read Mar 2025 "Few places in American life attract a broader cross-section of society," Silver writes of casinos, and the book opens at one in…