In my humble opinion as a mathematician, the problem is not the quants modeling financial markets. Those are smart and highly capable fellows. The problem is the decisionmakers in banks, who rely too heavily on the models. No-one can predict the future. Also that's not what quants do. They predict a distribution, not a value, because prediction a value is not possible. Also it's known that the classical models have shortcomings. The quant business is all about doing the best you can to minimize risk. It's better to use a good model with some shortcomings than no model.
I did maths from a top university and then did Masters in financial maths - most of the material was useless in the real world. After I just liked the general outline of finance/investing concepts which are far more easier to understand and practical. Later did a Masters in Real Estate Investment & Finance and found that even more practical to life. The only thing a company will care about if they do not understand a Quant with PhD and years of programming/modelling is if he can produce models that make the company money! If the can create correlations between certain data points to give an early trade advantage for the hedge fund. Otherwise it is all useless. In the academic world the concepts are celebrated but in the real world it is all about the $$$'s!
“Some men wrest a living from nature. This is called work. Some men wrest a living from those who wrest a living from nature. This is called trade. Some men wrest a living from those who wrest a living from those who wrest a living from nature. This is called finance.” - ~ Fr. Vincent McNabb
I think there's only a handful of people in the world that truly understand how some of these derivatives work
Great video. Financial mathematicians/computer scientists providing transparency to what really happened during 2008 financial crisis
I liked this documentary very much. Thanks for uploading! I am an amateur trader of stocks in Europe (in Lithuania). I have never seen such a beautiful presentation of reality - stock "laws" are not Newtons laws and stuff like that...
Mike Osinski was my Prep School Roommate at Saint Andrews, Boca Raton, Florida. We graduated together in 1972. He was always brilliant and a great athlete as well. He was my best friend.....a thousand years ago.
Too drunk to truly appreciate this at the moment but I will watch it when I sober up
Wow. This is an amazing film about the craziness on Wall Street. Well Done! As a trader myself, this film is a wonderful look at the inside world of Wall Street and the absurdity of the ludicrous optimism and incorrect assumptions made on the street.
I like the fact that the English guy had come to the realization, and was pointing out, that it was all ultimately meaningless and contrived, and bogus, and they would be far better off dedicating their talents and brains to actual science rather than this financial contrivance.
I can hear Emanuel Derman's South African twang the second he spoke. It never leaves you!
Quantitative finance will only continue to grow. As Derman says in the video, it is a question of incentives. Profit will always be a bigger incentive than most anything else at any moment. So ultimately we need a game changer that will systematically prevent toxic conditions. We need to mature as a capitalist society otherwise we might not make it the next time around.
18:23-19:35 Most important point in this video. It's Wall St. in a nutshell, especially private equity and hedge funds that benefit from the carried interest loophole.
Amazing. Uploaded on March 4th, 2010, and date of 2010 Flash Crash, May 6th.
Fantastic video. Love how they detailed the banking element as well as the software developers' perspectives. Being a software developer myself, I can relate entirely. Kudos for the great work!
There is an unjustified mixing of two different things: 1) quant work (quantative analysis) of the like used to price and CDOs and CDSs and analyze portfolios, 2) High frequency trading. The first 37 minutes are focused on quant work, and then (@ 37:45) someone mentions high-freq trading and suddenly the rest of the documentary becomes about that! That is a different topic altogether. The only commonality is that math and computers are involved in both! In fact, the areas where quant work was most infamous, the pricing and risk modelling of CDOs and CDSs, have been entirely devoid of high-frequency trading. The reason is that those derivatives are not very liquid (i.e. do not change hands every minute of the day) and HFT, by definition, requires very liquid markets.
39:20 Two months after Wilmott mentions the "next crash could be within minutes", it happened. Being an algo trader myself, the "speed" of markets is always increasing - it takes less and less time to make the same wave pattern.
Joel Tillinghast, fund manager at Fidelity, says the problem with quants can be too much abstraction. They get so caught up in the math they forget they're dealing with shares of a company and not just abstract numbers.
So fascinated about quantitative analysis. Im so happy i discovered it before deciding on my masters degree. Just started to study finance and in my free time i lookup courses about linear algebra and statistiks until i am ready to start the quant course!
@vprodocumentary