La terrible vida del Quant

"Asked to compare her work to physics, one quant, (...), termed the market “a wild beast” that cannot be controlled, and then added: “It’s not like building a bridge. If you’re right more than half the time you’re winning the game.” There are a thousand physicists on Wall Street, she estimated, and many, she said, talk nostalgically about science. “They sold their souls to the devil,” she said, adding, “I haven’t met many quants who said they were in finance because they were in love with finance.”"

Los quants son las personitas encargadas de ponerle mucha matemática al mundillo de las finanzas, calcular riesgos y hacer ganar grandes sumas de dinero a otras personitas (o sea, la clave de Wall Street). En esta nota del NYT (de donde sale la cita), la "culpa" de los quants en la crisis queda en un lugar secundario ("Dr. Derman said, “Nobody ever took these models as playing chess with God.”), a diferencia de lo que se planteaba en esta nota (gracias LCM), donde, por el contrario, se los acusaba -a uno en particular- de haber hecho "la fórmula que mató a Wall Street". No importa lo que de verdad haya sucedido, seguramente haya más en los próximos años:

The problem is not that there are too many physicists on Wall Street, he said, but that there are not enough. A graduate, he told the young recruits, can make $75,000 to $250,000 a year as a quant but can also be fired if things go sour. He said an investment banker had told him that Wall Street was not looking for Ph.D.’s, but what he called “P.S.D.s — poor, smart and a deep desire to get rich.”