The Quants How a Small Band of Maths Wizards Took Over Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed it

The Quants places the recent breakdown of the financial system within a larger context of a world ruled by intellectual hubris. Quants are quantitative analysts and this gripping narrative of brilliance and ambition follows the rise of these young maths geniuses let loose in Wall Street's candy store as they zoomed from the bottom of the Street's pecking order to its pinnacle. Their ascent was predicated on the belief that they had invented - and were fine-tuning - brilliant and impregnable computer programmes that would always outperform the market. Unfortunately, these programmes turned out to be ticking timebombs. The story actually begins in the 1950s when a successful gambler named Ed Thorp decided that skills learned at the Vegas gambling tables could be applied equally successfully to the financial markets. He soon acquired followers and imitators and over the next few decades they assumed positions of ever-greater power and influence. Eccentric, brilliant, often larger than life, they achieved extraordinary success and massive wealth. The Quants follows them from boom to bust, explaining why they were so self-confident, and why they got it so disastrously wrong.