{"id":3299,"date":"2009-07-31T22:28:37","date_gmt":"2009-08-01T06:28:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/?p=3299"},"modified":"2009-07-31T22:28:37","modified_gmt":"2009-08-01T06:28:37","slug":"the-rise-and-fall-of-the-quants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/2009\/07\/31\/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-quants\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rise and Fall of the Quants"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best career for Engineering, Math and Physics Ph.D. are in the wall street. Maybe studying hard science would become back in fashion again with the potential reward. It is just odd that those who want to earn quick money in finance have the will to earn a hard science Ph.D. in the first place. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n


\nBy Prachi Patel – August 2009 – IEEE Spectrum<\/p>\n

When the U.S. financial system melted down, fingers were quickly pointed at the \u201cquants\u201d\u2014the physicists, mathematicians, and engineers who had devised the computer programs, statistical tools, and financial instruments that were supposed to help investors manage risks. Critics said that it was the flawed assumptions of those financial models that brought banking to the brink of Armageddon.<\/p>\n

You might guess that Wall Street is now shunning physicists, mathematicians, and engineers, but you\u2019d be wrong. Talented people with quantitative backgrounds are more welcome than ever [see sidebar, “Why Be a Quant “], says Petter Kolm, deputy director of New York University\u2019s master\u2019s program for mathematics in finance and formerly a quant for Goldman Sachs. Before the financial mess started in the fall of 2007, he says, investment banks typically hired fresh MBA grads as entry-level analysts. \u201cMany investment banks I talk to today say they want to replace that portion of people with MBAs with people who have quantitative analysis skills, such as engineering and math.\u201d<\/p>\n

The culture of Wall Street is already relying less on traditions and personal connections and more on complex technologies. Juhua Zhu, who has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton and is now a vice president at Morgan Stanley, saw the change coming shortly after joining the firm four years ago. She says it was soon clear that \u201ctraditional trader jobs would vanish as many transactions would be transferred to computers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those changes are carving out a need for more math whizzes and data crunchers. \u201cQuantitative jobs demand research talent\u2014people who can read any text in a technical field and reach a high level of expertise in a short amount of time,\u201d says Alp Atici, a Columbia University math Ph.D. who works as a quantitative researcher at hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. \u201dPeople with Ph.D.\u2019s in science and pure math are usually accustomed to much harder and deeper research texts.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the first quants was Robert Merton, who started out as an applied mathematician at Caltech before switching to economics at MIT. In 1969 he tried to work out the pricing of stock options with the help of stochastic calculus\u2014a branch of mathematics used to model random systems such as Brownian motion, the movement of particles in liquid. A high point for quants came when Merton and Myron Scholes won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics for their option-pricing model. (When it comes to low points, Merton, the quant trendsetter in so many ways, was ahead of his time again. He and Scholes were members of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management\u2019s board of directors when that company lost more than US $4 billion in 1998; the Federal Reserve, fearing a liquidity crisis, put together a restructuring plan that presaged its aggressive liquidity interventions in 2008.)<\/p>\n

The trickle of physicists and mathematicians eschewing low-paying academic jobs in favor of Wall Street bonuses turned into a flood in the Reagan years. The 1980s fads for junk bonds and leveraged buyouts came and went, but the quants stayed. Their direct role in today\u2019s recession started in the booming 1990s housing market as they helped banks package mortgages, credit cards, and other credit assets, slice up the packages, and sell them as instruments known as asset-backed securities. That took risky assets off companies\u2019 balance sheets, freed up capital, and let the companies borrow more money. Quants are credited with creating models that helped investors understand, manage, and price the risk associated with these securities.<\/p>\n

Asset-backed securities are a great innovation if used sparingly. But this did not happen. Emanuel Derman, industrial engineering and operations research professor at Columbia and author of the memoir My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, says banks \u201cgot too big for their boots and borrowed too much money.\u201d The quants\u2019 mathematical machinations didn\u2019t so much dilute risk as hide it. And then came the breaking point, one that quantitative models did not take into account: record numbers of subprime borrowers defaulting on their mortgages.<\/p>\n

So was this a lack of foresight on the quants\u2019 part? The simple truth is, there is no one right model, Derman says. Inputs to financial models are related to how people will behave in the future. But patterns of behavior change over time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re designing a global positioning system, the distance from here to Waterloo doesn\u2019t change,\u201d he says. \u201dFinancial engineering isn\u2019t based on financial science. It\u2019s scientific methods applied to human variables.\u201d<\/p>\n

But why didn\u2019t quants raise the alarm about risks associated with their innovations? NYU\u2019s Kolm says that business decision makers, not quants, were calling the shots and did not always care about the risks. At a major investment bank, he says, risk managers who tried to warn about risks were unpopular: \u201dEither you played along or you left because you were the bad guy at the party.\u201d It\u2019s also becoming clear that mortgage fraud played a big role in distorting the data that the models used to predict foreclosures\u2014a case of garbage in, garbage out.<\/p>\n

Despite the role that physicists and engineers played in the economic crisis, the relationship doesn\u2019t seem to have soured. Quants aren\u2019t being recruited less or fired more\u2014though there are fewer jobs overall as some companies, like Lehman Brothers, disappear, and others, like Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, merge. Beverly Principal, assistant director of employment services at Stanford, says that finance companies are still coming to campus, while a large number of students are still interested in financial careers. Career service representatives at other schools echo this sentiment.<\/p>\n

Companies have started to be selective, and people with advanced degrees have the upper hand. Credit Suisse Securities has spent the past year trying to attract people with doctorates in physics, math, and engineering from top schools, says Ilias Tagkopoulos, who got his Ph.D. in EE from Princeton last summer. A trifecta of skills\u2014programming, mathematical proficiency, and an ability to communicate\u2014led to his job at Credit Suisse as a relationship manager. Most members of his team are also Ph.D.\u2019s from top schools, he says.<\/p>\n

The lack of jobs, though, has started to make itself felt. Ming Zhong, a portfolio manager at Lazard Asset Management, an investment bank in New York City, says that when he graduated from Columbia with a master\u2019s in EE in 2004, 70 percent of the jobs available through the campus-recruiting program were finance related. Now, he says, graduates are having a hard time finding internships, even unpaid ones. \u201cOne year ago, I\u2019d say keep trying, always have hope. Six months ago, I suggested students look around. In the spring, I told them, \u2019You should think about changing careers.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

But things won\u2019t always be so bleak. When the economic pendulum eventually swings back, predicts Morgan Stanley\u2019s Zhu, \u201cthe whole pie will have shrunk, but the portion of jobs for people with a technical background will have continued to grow.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best career for Engineering, Math and Physics Ph.D. are in the wall street. Maybe studying hard science would become back in fashion again with the potential reward. It is just odd that those who want to earn quick money in finance have the will to earn a hard science Ph.D. in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"lc_iscn_info":[],"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[326,434],"class_list":["post-3299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-_newsclips","tag-ieee-spectrum","tag-wall-street"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Rise and Fall of the Quants - \u54f2\u5b50\u6232 Philosophist\u2019s Camp<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The best career for Engineering, Math and Physics Ph.D. are in the wall street. 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Das, IEEE Spectrum, March 2010 The opposite of superconductivity might lead to strange new circuits In\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News Clips"","block_context":{"text":"News Clips","link":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/category\/_reference\/_newsclips\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5666,"url":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/2011\/08\/27\/do-romantic-thoughts-reduce-womens-interest-in-engineering\/","url_meta":{"origin":3299,"position":2},"title":"Do Romantic Thoughts Reduce Women’s Interest in Engineering?","author":"hevangel","date":"August 27, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"If romance reduce girls' pursuit in engineering, probably the reverse is also true that girls choose engineering have less interest in romance as well. They should do a follow up research and survey a large sample of engineering girls, see how many of them had a boyfriend in high school.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News Clips"","block_context":{"text":"News Clips","link":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/category\/_reference\/_newsclips\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5722,"url":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/23\/faster-than-a-speeding-photon\/","url_meta":{"origin":3299,"position":3},"title":"Faster Than a Speeding Photon","author":"hevangel","date":"September 23, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Neutrino is faster than light! If there is no experimental error, it will be the biggest discovery since Einstein's relativity theory. In fact, this result prove that Einstein is wrong. If something can be faster than light, then time travel may be possible. By Rachel Courtland, IEEE Spectrum, Fri, September\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News Clips"","block_context":{"text":"News Clips","link":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/category\/_reference\/_newsclips\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5498,"url":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/2011\/06\/24\/when-the-problem-is-the-problem\/","url_meta":{"origin":3299,"position":4},"title":"When the Problem Is the Problem","author":"hevangel","date":"June 24, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the only thing I learned from my master degree. Asking the right question is half way done to get the right answer. In fact asking the right question probably more important than getting the right answer. Once you stated the question correctly, things magically fall into place and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Daily Scribble"","block_context":{"text":"Daily Scribble","link":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/category\/_scribble\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5779,"url":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/2011\/10\/14\/rip-dennis-ritchie-1941-2011\/","url_meta":{"origin":3299,"position":5},"title":"RIP Dennis Ritchie (1941 – 2011)","author":"hevangel","date":"October 14, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"When the world is mourning with the death of Steve Jobs, the world lost another tech pioneer Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C and UNIX. To many geeks, Dennis' role in the computer revolution is way more important than Steve. Dennis Ritchie, the Bell Labs computer scientist who created the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News Clips"","block_context":{"text":"News Clips","link":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/category\/_reference\/_newsclips\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3300,"href":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3299\/revisions\/3300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.horace.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}