There's been an explosion of (mostly critical) coverage of Quant Finance in the last few months - and here's the run down, in case you missed anything.
The Plight of the Quants
Daniel Roth, Wired
The Secret Formula that Destroyed Wall Street
Felix Salmon, Wired
When Quants Don't Think
Felix Salmon, Wired
They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street
Dennis Overbye, The New York Times
The Fat-Tailed Straw Man
Richard Bookstaber, RGE Monitor
How the USSR gave us Wall Street's quant craze
Andrea Chalupa, DailyFinance
How Wall Street's Army Of Quants Controls Your Mind, Money
Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
The game is NOT over for quants
Dominic Connor, eFinancialCareers
Buffeted "quants" are still in demand
Phil Wahba, International Herald and Tribune
Risk Mismanagement
Joe Nocera, New York Times
The great risk myth
John Danielsson, The Business Spectator
New theories attempt to explain the financial crisis
David Futrelle, CNN Money
From Bachelier to Bust - Why Finance isn't Scientific Enough
Jacob Bettany, Velocity Magazine
Quotes from the most recent NYT article:
"I regard quants to be the good guys... We did try to warn people... This is a crisis caused by business decisions. This isn’t the result of pointy-headed guys from fancy schools who didn’t understand volatility or correlation." - Eric R. Weinstein, a mathematical physicist who runs the Natron Group, a hedge fund in Manhattan.
"The recent debacle has only increased the hunger for scientists on Wall Street..." - Andrew Lo,
"What do we use models for...? ...Making money... That’s not what science is about." - Satyajit Das, a former trader and financial consultant.
"What is amazing to me as I learn about this is how flimsy was the theoretical basis of the claims that derivatives and other complex financial instruments reduced risk, when their use in fact brought on instabilities." - Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario
"I think physicists should go back to the physics department and leave Wall Street alone..." - Nassim Taleb
