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

With the immediacy of today’s NASDAQ close and the timeless power of a Greek tragedy, The Quants is at once a masterpiece of explanatory journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and hubris, and an ominous warning about Wall Street’s future. 

In March of 2006, four of 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, but those numbers meant nothing to them. They were accustomed to risking billions. 
 
On that night, these four men and their cohorts were the new kings of Wall Street.  Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein were among the best and brightest of a new breed, the quants. Over the prior twenty years, this species of math whiz--technocrats who make billions not with gut calls or fundamental analysis but with formulas and high-speed computers--had usurped the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk-takers who’d long been the alpha males the world’s largest casino. The quants helped create a digitized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe with the click of a mouse. Few realized, though, that in creating this unprecedented machine, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness and Weinstein had sowed the seeds for history’s greatest financial disaster.  
 
Drawing on unprecedented access to these four number-crunching titans, The Quants tells the inside story of what they thought and felt in the days and weeks when they helplessly watched much of their net worth vaporize--and wondered just how their mind-bending formulas and genius-level IQ’s had led them so wrong, so fast. 

• Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market
• More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite (Council on Foreign Relations Books (Penguin Press))
• Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
• A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market
• When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
• My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance
• Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One
• Inside the Black Box: A Simple Guide to Quantitative and High Frequency Trading
• Liar's Poker (Norton Paperback)
• The Spider Network: How a Math Genius and a Gang of Scheming Bankers Pulled Off One of the Greatest Scams in History