In case you didn’t know, The Quants Run Wall Street Now, or so says a headline in today’s Wall Street Journal. Quant-run hedge funds now control the largest share (27 percent) of stock trading of any investor type, according to the article. That’s up from 2010 when quant-based trading was tied with bank trades for the bottom share. Algorithm-based trading is, of course, the ‘sine qua non’ of hedge funds and has helped lift them to the top of the investing crowd.
The WSJ article, written by Gregory Zuckerman and Bradley Hope, quickly reviews the rise of quants in the financial industry and showcases its still-growing attraction as a lucrative career for algorithm stars formerly headed for computer science. Here’s an excerpt:
“A decade ago, the brightest graduates all wanted to be traders at Wall Street investment banks, but now they’re climbing over each other to get into quant funds,” says Anthony Lawler, who helps run quantitative investing at GAM Holding AG. The Swiss money manager last year bought British quant firm Cantab Capital Partners for at least $217 million to help it expand into computer-powered funds.
“Guggenheim Partners LLC built what it calls a “supercomputing cluster” for $1 million at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California to help crunch numbers for Guggenheim’s quant investment funds, says Marcos Lopez de Prado, a Guggenheim senior managing director. Electricity for the computers costs another $1 million a year.
“Algorithmic trading has been around for a long time but was tiny. An article in The Wall Street Journal in 1974 featured quant pioneer Ed Thorp. In 1988, the Journal profiled a little-known Chicago options-trading firm that had a secret computer system. Journal reporter Scott Patterson wrote a best-selling book in 2010 about the rise of quants.”
Link to full article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-quants-run-wall-street-now-1495389108