quantitative finance Quotes

Financial hydrogen bombs built on personal computers by 26-year-olds with MBAs.

Investors should be skeptical of history-based models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding priesthood using esoteric terms such as beta, gamma, sigma and the like, these models tend to look impressive. Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the models. Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

The HoLee model was the first term structure model. I remember reading their paper soon after it was published and as it was fairly different from many of the other papers that I had read, I had to read it quite a few times. I realized that it was a really important paper.

I have a quantitative background, but really, derivatives appealed to me because they require so much creativity.

In the financial sector, those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.

No formula in finance tells you that the moat is 28 feet wide and 16 feet deep. That's what drives the academics crazy. They can compute standard deviations and betas, but they can't understand moats.

I grade my stocks. I'm what they call a quant, one of the geeks of the stock market.

In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.

I started John W. Henry & Company because I enjoyed applying mathematics to markets, and it was a profound challenge that resonated within me.

Our starting point then was trying to find a way to incorporate mean reversion into the HoLee model.

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.