Six Quant Finance Pioneers Walk Into a Bar, and No One Has a Stock Tip
Listening in as mathematicians, traders, and bestselling writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb talk about uncertainty, risk and the probabilistic life.
From left: Bruno Dupire, Aaron Brown, Neil Chriss, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Raphael Douady and Mike Lipkin.
Photographer: Adrienne Grunwald for Bloomberg Markets
Quantitative investing is taken for granted on Wall Street. It wasn’t always so: In the early 1980s, “if you had a math degree you scrubbed it from your résumé,” says Aaron Brown, former chief risk manager at investment firm AQR and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. By the ’90s, finance was attracting people who thought rigorously and playfully about probability, uncertainty and games—which have close parallels to markets. Some of them often found themselves at the Odeon restaurant in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood. “You just knew on certain nights you’d find a crowd,” Brown says.
Had you been at the bar and tried to eavesdrop, you likely wouldn’t have caught any hot stock tips. “All we talked about was probability problems,” says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the investing classic Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. Bruno Dupire, a mathematician with degrees in numerical analysis and artificial intelligence, might come up with a probability quiz. (Dupire is now head of quantitative research for Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Markets.)