Not a Quant
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I still didn’t know anything about finance. I had been busy learning how to do .Net apps. But according to my new headhunter that didn’t matter. He said he still couldn’t get me into fixed-income because I “didn’t know any math” but equities was no problem.
“It’s more about… designing user interfaces,” he said, waving his hands.
I was finally going to see behind the curtain after all. And it sounded like what I wanted to do. Real-time, distributed apps with user-interfaces that were somehow relevant to whatever the fuck was going in the world. But his statements about math and its relationship to finance were bewildering.
For one thing, I thought I knew some math. I had a math minor in college and many years of math in public school. For another, I thought building user-interfaces required math. And finally, I thought the stuff on the displays was also math.
But it turns out that math on Wall Street follows a different set of axioms. I won’t deploy the whole treatise here but I can share a few basics:
Axiom 1 — YOU don’t know ANY math.
Axiom 2 — Equities don’t require ANY math.
Corollary to 2 — Equity traders are MORONS.
On Wall Street the use of mathematics was the exclusive preserve of spectacular individuals known as quants. The quant magic was something that only a few could perform. But it could cure diseased portfolios and keep the dark forces of the market at bay. Quants had to be selected from an early age and to undergo rigorous training in order to develop their powers safely. In a plot twist straight out of Robert Jordan, self-trained feral quants were considered extremely dangerous, which was why it was important to profess a complete absence of knowledge.
Quants were powerful. They could cast their influence across the globe instantaneously. They didn’t sleep like the rest of us. They just continued their business in the overnight markets where they would create the news that mortal investors would read about in the morning.
If you ever encounter a quant on the field of battle, my advice is to run. If you try to stand your ground it will surely be the end of you. You can never win a fight, or even a debate, with a quant.
But real quants are not only tireless and invincible, they are also invisible.
You see, a real quant will always deny being a quant. They never refer to themselves as quants. And those who are not quants know better than to fake it. You could end up in a fight with a real quant that way. In my six years on Wall Street I only met one real quant and the encounter would almost kill me.
Of course, not everyone agrees that quants are real. Some say it’s all a myth. My point is really this; if you go for a programming job on Wall Street and someone asks you if you know any math, the answer is no.
But don’t expect to escape answering the math questions.
