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Actually, I do. Do you?

I found it strange that a guy got downvoted for suggesting that a hedge fund used technical analysis. I hate TA, but then, I hate Quant Finance, too. Whoever thinks that the smart guys at RenTech and the like use that kiddie Stochastic Calculus taught at MFE programs is living in a state of sin. Period.

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Technical analysis is just voodoo. I don't know what you mean by "quant finance" but stat arb is merely played out.

The finance academics borrowed the mathematics from physics and the rigor from mathematics, but they forgot that, at the core, theirs is a social science. If they wanted to borrow anything from physics, they could have borrowed the good habit of comparing their theoretical results with experimental data. In physics, a theory is little more than mental masturbation until it's confronted with experiment. That nicely summarizes the state of contemporary academic finance: mental masturbation. Just because physicists were blessed with the ability to model natural phenomena using mathematics, it does not mean other scientists have such luck.

Have you actually worked in this field? As a quant?

I did. I was unimpressed. I was used to working in fields where theories could be trusted. Finance is a lawless territory. It's fun because problems lack structure and are so hard. It's frustrating because 30 years ago my skills would have allowed me to do something cool, while now the field is saturated and the odds are stacked against you. I moved to greener pastures and never looked back.

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