What do Wall Street quants actually do?

The math nerds have taken over Wall Street. Why? How? And by god what does it mean? Dan Toomey is the only mortal capable of answering such questions. Suck it 60 Minutes.

Featuring interviews with Gregory Zuckerman (WSJ investigative reporter and author of The Man Who Solved the Market), Inti Mantripp (former quant analyst at Bank of America), and a couple of anonymous hosses who have worked in ~the elite quant space~.

Thumbnail design by Seth Laupus
Packaging design by Jen Walsh
Video by Dan Toomey and Henry Stockwell

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GOOD WORK ON ALL PLATFORMS: @goodworkmb
DAN ON IG: @dhtoomey

[-chisai-]

quitting my job to watch this, thank you Dan!

[MikeStoneJapan]

That point about the weather and the pipeline functioning is honestly fascinating

[timothyjohnson]

My life is nothing but stochastic drift

[anyvoicespeaks]

Quants are basically a wall of people who are smart that hedge funds use to make it look like their insider trades are carefully calculated.

[ahhanaverma]

i may not be a quant or a journalist of the reputed dan toomey's caliber, but i, too, am passionate about edge

[glesbygd]

either your tie is very long or your torso is very short

[FlyingDutchyZA]

That clip from The Big Short lives in my brain rent free

[kevinboushel]

I have never in my life seen a 9 minute 59 video on YouTube. What is this deviousness Dan?

[GoodWorkMB]

We have now fully investigated quants. What should we cover next?

[TheBashxDProductions]

I clicked fully expecting The Big Short scene with "That's my quant... My quantitative" was not disappointed 😂

[sereysothe.a]

they do statistics all day. the math used in quant finance isn't earth-shattering, it's essentially just graduate level statistics applied in clever ways on massive datasets and really fast computers

[mikelauful]

The flash of Sam Bankman-Fried's face on the Jane Street logo was masterful.

[davidli]

I'm a risk quant in a top tier IB. Another point to mention is that there are a lot of different types of quants. Buy side, sell side, high frequency, low frequency, pricing, risk, assets allocation, hedging strategy, and model validation etc. The nature (and pay) are very different.

[flugelblarghen]

This is honestly the realest sounding job so far. Also something I might have actually enjoyed if I had reallised it was an option and was actually motivated when I was younger

[mcleanblades]

I had a six month developer stint at Renaissance in 1995. I was there because I knew J - a dialect of the APL programming language. The language R was just getting popular. That company was led by Jim Simons who was celebrated in the WSJ. . In the mid 2000s Renaissance paid a big fine to the SEC which nearly equaled their profits from the beginning of time. In the 90s the company had daily trades in the tens of millions. Backgrounds varied. One Quant I knew had a Phd in Physics. He was good at using Mathematica to make graphs.. He knew the investment algorithms. Each evening computers would predict changes for the market the next day. There was a daily actual vs expected. The firm had only 30 employees. At that time offices in Walnut Creek Ca and Rhode Island. Jim mostly worked from Road island and Sandor and Harry lead up CA. Sandor did the hiring and he looked for a Masters in Operations Research just out of UC Berkeley. A fresh grad with a Masters in Mathematics owned purchasing commodity contracts.

[TobiSamaEatinCookies]

Honesty, if more financial information was presented in this way, I would probably know A LOT more about the stock market and finance in general.

[JonJon-kxxl]

Can you investigate my dad he went missing when I was a kid

[brownbelpois]

Glad to see you're alive and well after the Zyn incident

[elmagnifico]

My quantitave analysis clearly shows the chances of Mr. Dan Toomey becoming the MVP of journalism skyrocketing this fiscal year

[lansing]

Dan. I don't believe you without the trench coat