Ask HN: How come so many of you know about stocks/finance ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How come so many of you know about stocks/finance ?

112 pointsMaven911106 comments

Do a lot of you work in the field or have degrees in business??

Whenever there is a discussion on stocks, HFT, economy, a lot of seem to know about it (more then just a wikipedia search or passing interest...which I would say I have)

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If you're interested in startups, you've got to know this stuff. The foundation of just about all business is the capital markets - without them, the big dollar buyouts and IPOs don't happen. Understanding financial markets is understanding the foundation of society, and understanding the history of financial markets is a better roadmap of 'how did we get here' than, say, studying the personalities of kings and presidents. Sitting in front of your computer, literally everything you touch and look at is the product of the organisation of finance through capital markets. Without it, factories don't get built, shipping doesn't happen, nothing would get done.

Once you understand financial markets, you realise your startup is actually two products : one is the product that people buy, the other is the company as a product, which means the company as an investment opportunity. If you understand what capital markets want from companies, you can design that into your company to make it more saleable.

Also, any decent undergrad course worth attending should at least cover finance and economics, even if at 101 level. I don't believe any education in the modern world is complete until the person has an in-depth understanding of the importance of financial markets in our daily lives, even if you disagree with it.

I disagree that financial markets are the foundation of society. Instead, I think they're more near the top or to the "side". Closer to the foundation of society is more basic and primal human needs and wants, and people doing real work, making real things that other people need or want. Finance is just a very modern abstraction. It can be useful, but also just another form of gambling or parasitism. Again, not to say it's not useful to understand. Just not part of the foundation of society.

Globalization and modern business practices have unfortunately made global finance markets a very real core part of the way a society functions.

That's why a market crash in the US throws the world into a financial depression: small businesses cannot get loans, governments and consumers lose confidence, jobs are lost, people starve.

It's probably more along the lines of people having built what we have today upon the capital markets as a foundation, to the point where many people don't realize that there is bedrock that is supporting that foundation.

Thank you for getting my point.

Agreed the finance "layer" of the world today is important and can have large positive/negative effects on the "real" part of the economy. I just don't think it's part of the foundation. One thought experiment would be to imagine the world without finance: could we still eat? have places to sleep at night? Raise kids? Heck yes. Now instead imagine a world without food or shelter or babies, or the ability to make them. We'd be doomed. Also, humans lived millions of years without finance and can again in the future if really needed. We can't live without food production/consumption. Foundation elements are revealed real quick in these kinds of comparisons, I think.

Again, not to dismiss finance and capital markets, investment, etc. as non-useful. It's just that they are a very modern and recent invention, at best one particular tool, and only an abstract layer on top of the more "real" parts of human existance.

Modern society, esp. one nearing 7 billion in number cannot live without finance. Without finance to equitably allocate resources, there would be massive shortages -> famines -> wars -> apocalypse. However, I am going to pull the intellectually lazy card and not go through all the trouble to prove this, and allow the reader to chew on it as a hypothesis. It's late, and I'm tired.

Finance has been around in some form since ancient Babylon.

Well I suppose if you want to look at it like that, than by strict definition, you're right, we can still have a functioning society without capital markets.

But as today's cities/nation states, at some comparable level of comfort and consumption, we cannot function without those markets. Hence why there are those of us who believe they are the foundation of modern society.

They are neither modern nor recent, you are completely wrong about this. And when people abolish capital markets people have a tendency to starve, see the russian revolution, maos great leap forward and the de-colonization of the third world. Today the us is at a level of prosperity that would make sure people didn't starve if financial markets disappeared, it got that rich trough a process of economic growth for wich financial markets were essential.

I disagree - if there were no capital markets, there would be nothing to build your house, or bed from. You would be forced to build your house and eat from what was lying around in your local area, even if you organise a tribal organisation to all help each other. You would live a short life and see many of your children die before their 5th birthday. Because that's how it used to be.

The dramatic improvements in lives came about at the time of the industrial revolution, which in itself was partially an engineering outbreak, but also an outbreak of the abilities to raise and organise capital that had been perfected by financing risky and long sea voyages, which, in themselves brought about dramatic lifts in quality of life. No finance, no 'new world', no USA.

I might add that 'capital markets' cover the entire span of financing, from angel investing to the big board in New York. The principles are just the same and the knowledge required is very similar.

You may dislike the capital markets, but you cannot deny that the rise in standard of living, technology and wealth is not linked to the invention of both structured lending, pooled risk/reward and ability to trade both equity and debt to other people. If you meld my thoughts with PG's discussion at http://paulgraham.com/gap.html you can see the rise in wealth and living standards happening in parallell along with the developments of structured and tradeable debt, invention of partial ownership and tradeable securities (share markets) and of pooled risk taking (insurance). I also recommend Niall Fergusons' 'Ascent of Money' for a good backdrop into how/why this is. http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/d...

Again, you might dislike the role that markets have, but pretending they are some sort of bolt-on that could be disposed is very naive thinking.

This discussion about the foundation of society is like two people arguing whether the foundation of life is evolution or sunshine. The only real point of contention is how to define "foundation", and any given answer will stem from ideology, and will therefore be worthless.

Thanks for that Amazon link--looks interesting.

He also did a documentary series of the same name, so if you can track that down, it is very watchable and informative.

Even better! The whole thing is on Google Video, too.

Finance is about as old as civilization,* the Babylonians did it. To take an amount of money from someone who does not, at the moment, need it and loaning it to whoever can pay the most for the privilegie (often another middleman in the huge network that is a modern financial market) is a type of work that is essential to our system of production. Without people doing this kind of work this page would not have existed (if memory serves me right viaweb, PGs company, got venture capital). The arrogance with wich people diss finance (and the amount of upvotes these kinds of comments get) show why learning finance 101 really should be part of a good undergraduate curriculum.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money

edit: yes, some financial markets are indeed parasitic, this is often because someone got the public to guarantee for something. This has more to do with the political economy than financial markets per se.

There's a big secret to finance, at least up to some level: It's a lot simpler than you think.

Even things like hedge funds, which are often popularly presented as impossible for mere mortals to understand are pretty simple conceptually. (Having said that, some of the specific hedges used can be complicated are require a high level of economic literacy to follow)

So it's more an issue of: 1) understanding how something specific works and 2) understanding all the related jargon. While both of these might be relatively simple (at least for the base case) it still takes the time to learn them. Many of these things cannot just be learned on-the-fly by picking up context clues in a discussion (though I think that the jargon is a large part of this).

Isn't this (partly) true of programming as well? And in fact, almost every field?

If someone drops in on a conversation between two programmers, he'll probably be lost in a sea of jargon, even though they could explain what they're talking about quite simply if they wanted to (it would take a little longer, but it could be done).

That secret is not just about finance, it is about almost everything. Most of complex systems were built from simple and understandable parts. The problem is - one should learn the underlying rules and principles first.

I work in an Investment Bank and I can second it.

Marketplace Whiteboard does a great job explaining market concepts with analogies and simple whiteboard visuals (and is available as a podcast)

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/collections/coll_display....

I worked on Wall Street starting in the mid 80s and with and on trading desks since the mid 90s. I've built the technology for equity trading desks and program trading desks. I was the business manager for a couple of program trading desks. I've created trading products (most notably a dark pool that mixed retail and institutional order flow).

I am a big believer that individual investors can't beat CAPM and shouldn't be picking stocks. I think the ideal portfolio is a mix of treasuries, equity and debt index funds, and angel investments.

Did working on Wall St give you the experience you needed to become one of the Great Old Ones?

It might be the other way around.

You both have too much faith in time and causality.

"I am a big believer that individual investors can't beat CAPM and shouldn't be picking stocks."

First of all, hasn't CAPM been shown to be a nice, but not terribly accurate, picture of how the market works? Among other things, it assumes that asset returns are normally distributed random variables, it assumes that investors have homogeneous expectations about the return of an asset (aka everyone has the same info at the same time and observes the same risk and expected return of any particular asset), and it doesn't explain variance in stock returns. In other words, it doesn't accurately mirror reality.

Secondly, while I agree that most people shouldn't be picking stocks, my hair still bristles when I hear someone say that individual investors can't beat the market. True, little retail investors are probably at a disadvantage to the bigger, faster funds out there, but this hasn't stopped a handful of people from beating the market. <brag>I've averaged 28% annual returns over the past 12 years. Maybe you would say I'm just lucky though? </brag>

Well, by definition, half the investors (by portfolio size) beat the market, and the other half fail. And everybody assumes that they are in the top 50%, which is unlikely since the winners stay and losers cash out.

So most investors can't beat the market. I guess you could also look at the risks - betting a small amount (and finding out if you have the chops) could be a reasonable bet. Leaving large sums in the hands of someone else (as opposed to say an index fund) ... less good.

  <brag>I've averaged 28% annual returns over the past 12 years.

Factoring in your transaction costs, how does your investing strat compare to buying and holding a large index like VFINX over the same time period?

Telling us your returns means nothing without a way to compare to the market as a whole.

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

and

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...;

What I quoted is after transaction costs. If I go off from Jan 1, 1998 when the S&P was 975.04 to Dec 31, 2009 when it was 1115.0, that means it has averaged 1.12% compounded annually.

Oh, that's not so much.

I didn't say that CAPM precisely modeled the market. I said that individual investors can't beat CAPM, meaning they can't beat the reward/risk relationship predicted by the model.

The model predicts that you can get higher returns by accepting greater variance on those returns. Even at moderate risk levels, it's easy to predict that some investors will happen to get the kind of returns you describe. Were your returns a result of your agency? Who can say.

Let's sidestep the issue of luck. I don't believe it is likely that your prior returns are a meaningful indicator of your future returns. But I could be wrong.

For a given asset, (Jensen's) Alpha is usually quite small compared to total return. How do you isolate the Alpha you identify?

Lots of techies are single people with low expenses. Therefore they are likely to have money to invest.

At that point, you really have no choice to learn stocks, since most other avenues don't lead to much return.

A lot of smart people go into finance and make a lot of money, so I think there's a general curiosity about their methods and techniques. Unfortunately the better you understand it the more cynical you'll get. :-p

"A lot of smart people go into finance and make a lot of money"...

Any references?

If you meant they make a lot of money working as employees (e.g. as traders in banks that get a lot in bonuses even when they blow everythng up) then my comment was irrelevant. If you mean that a lot of people make money by beating the market (that's how i got it) then I would still like to see these references.

For some reason, your average nerd often considers themselves to be a part-time economist. A nerd meeting an economist would likely attempt to argue out points, where you wouldn't do the same if you met a brain surgeon. It is just that type of field where you can pick up things in your 'spare time' and sound smart enough to hold a conversation. It must piss real economists off a lot .. (I couldn't imagine economists arguing about why RubyOnRails won't scale, but you see the opposite scenario - geeks/nerds arguing fine economic points, all the time)

Same goes for nerds thinking they're lawyers or judges.

...or lawyers thinking they're judges?

...or law students thinking they are lawyers?

It's similar to the question "How come so many people seem to know so much about politics?"

Low barrier to entry, everyone has an opinion, and since the field is subjective, there's generally no "right" or "wrong" answer.

Yes, but in finance you can at least put your money where your mouth is.

It's worth starting to learn about at almost any point in your life - (smart) investing teaches you how to look at numbers, be rational, fight off being impulsive, think critically, etc, etc.

It's probably good to start learning about investing 2 to 3 years before you actually have any cash, especially talking with smart people about their portfolios. Then you can talk to them a year later, if they're candid they'll tell you how things went. It's interesting seeing my friends who bought trying to time the market largely got wrecked - one friend lost a lot trying to catch the falling knife of Indymac and Washington Mutual. Another friend who lives in Amsterdam is a more fundamental investor, looks at the numbers and the markets. He invested in Marvel before it got bought by Disney and Baidu after the crash, and made a lot since then.

Long story short, it's a good brain exercise no matter what, it's a topic that matters to a lot of people, it's fun, it's very flexible, and so on.

Can't speak too well for other cities, but in Hong Kong, up until very recently, no one besides hedge funds and grad schools had interesting programming problems to work on. So if you wanted to be surrounded by good hackers, you either went into finance, or you were in an M.Phil programme while you wait for a visa to go to a country where there's non-finance jobs with interesting problems to hack at.

Fortunately this is slowly changing (after years of useless government "innovation" initiatives like CyberPort which just turned into subsidies for politically-connected real-estate developers); we've got more non-finance companies doing development (and not just sales), like Artificial Life, and there's more of an entrepreneurial vibe in the air (rather than CompSci majors automatically chasing after jobs in the big companies).

It's a complex system. A good gacker loves a complex system.

This, as much as anything else.

I'm pretty sure that's a typo, but gacker totally deserves to be a real word.

I propose this word be adopted for the up-and-coming geeks of the next generation who, instead of hacking on silicon, will be splicing genes in their bedroom. genetic-hackers.

Gacker (n): Someone who plays the game of genetics using both zinc fingers and stem cells.

a financial hacker would be a facker

Or a Fugger. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugger)

I think it's easy to forget about the diversity we have here on HN. We've got traders, climate scientists, ex-Marines, lawyers, chefs, etc.

FYI: Jarheads I've known prefer that you say "former Marine" and not "ex-Marine", as "ex" can have negative connotations.

Once a Marine, always a Marine.

Sorry about that. :)

If you are interested in learning about finance and economics, hands down the best source of learning through osmosis is the Bloomberg On The Economy podcasts by @tomkeene_ Look into it. All he does is interview really really smart people from Wall Street and nobel laureates in economics... really good show where the more you listen to it the more things start to make sense. If you have questions about other educational resources shoot me a tweet @petoveritas

Are you American? I've noticed Americans in general are really into this stuff. Most bank accounts come with advanced options like money market accounts, and its pretty normal for people to have a "portfolio". So I would say knowing about money is a far bigger part of the US culture than it is in say Europe.

The money market accounts most Americans have access to as part of their baking account is simply a higher interest rate savings account with slightly different restrictions. It's not investing by any stretch of the imagination.

I think the real difference is in the US is the feeling that our portfolio (i.e., our retirement account) is the only thing that will support us when we can't work anymore. Thus many Americans regardless of how much financial savvy are likely to talk about their retirement and how much it's been hit by the recession, the stock crash, whatever.

I founded http://Newsley.com. We're transitioning from a social news site for financial news into a real time search engine for economic and financial news.

We're in the process of rebuilding the back end right now, so there's not much to see on the front page aside from a social news site. If you click on an article's discussion page, you can see some to the semantic entity extraction that we're doing for each article, however.

To answer your question, when you build a site like that, you end up reading a lot of financial news, and you pick things up along the way. :)

Cool site. I've been looking for something ever since newmogul went down. Markenomics just didn't cut it as a replacement (mainly because there was hardly any good discussion there).

One comment about your design: Maybe use a smaller font so I can see more than 3 stories above the fold.

I second this! I've been looking for a replacement for newmogul as well.

Thanks, guys. I do need to change some of those font settings. I use huge monitors at home, so it doesn't really bother me.

The article submitter sometimes crashes, too. Feel free to ping me if you find any bugs, or have other suggestions. Jonathan@newsley.com

I notice many hackers are also interested in law. And politics.

Any complex system that generates interesting behavior out of a set of not very complicated rules is delightful to hack. If there are rules that generate rules, it's even more fun.

real answer is most of these guys dont know as much as they think. general coverage of financial topics miss a lot of the big picture.

Personally, I used to work in finance, so I had to know it - but I think it's essential knowledge for both employees and entrepreneurs.

Employees - well, if you're planning to make a career in some big company, you might as well invest in 401K, especially if they're offer matching. And then you usually get a choice between various funds. And obviously, you need to get educated about finance, because if you make wrong choices, you could get really fucked.

Entrepreneurs - obviously you need to be good at that when money valuations come into play for your startup. And here - same situation, if you're not educated about how that works, you're gonna get fucked.

And those are just some of the examples of situations you're going to run into where that knowledge is required.

Actually, you don't really need to know much to do a decent job investing for retirement.

Invest in a low-cost, index-based stock fund and similarly low-cost, diversified bond fund. Follow one the many simple formulas to decide what percentage should be in bonds vs stocks (usually based on years to retirement.)

What I wrote above will easily beat most of the more complicated plans out there especially after factoring in cost. You can of course get more complicated, but you usually only need to get more complicated if you have an awful lot of extra money which most people don't.

I would venture that a lot of us have the ability to pick up these concepts rather quickly. In addition, for those of us who are self-employed, it is beneficial to manage our retirement accounts.

I also traded at a options trading firm while in law school. I loved it.

Would it be because hackers make more money than they spend so they learn how to invest it?

I seem to be a 'know about finance HN user'[1]. I work for an Agency Broker[2] in London but the knowledge really comes from:

* How to Read the Financial Pages [3]

* Money Week subscription [4]

---------

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304249 , http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=667324 and others I'm too lazy to locate right now

[2] as a Java Dev

[3] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Read-Financial-Pages-Michael-Brett/d...

[4] http://www.moneyweek.com/

When it comes down to it I don't really know much, just enough to fake it online - like the other 90% of online posters about complex subjects that can be made ambiguous without much effort.

I have industry experience as a broker, trader, and currently developing strategies.

EDIT: My current position is only an internship for the summer as I finish up my MSFE degree.

What financial engineering program are you in? I've been looking into those and mathematical finance programs and would appreciate any feedback.

I make infrastructure for high frequency trading desks. Since the algo is a fairly small piece of code, and the OS is massive, there are big opportunities reducing latency in firmware, kernels, schedulers, transports, locking mechanisms, interrupts, and interconnects. Most investment banks are forming dedicated low latency infrastructure teams now and they're severely in need of skilled people.

You had to do something with all that free money from stock options in the 90's... :)

I have no formal finance experience, just a lot of hard-learned business and investment knowledge. It also helps that my wife has a degree in finance and runs the finance group for a tech company, so she and I can talk and discuss things from different angles.

I work for a hedge fund.

I'd be super-interested in hearing what that's like from a hacker point-of-view. Is it a big team? Are you doing standard IT work there or far-out, complex coding? If you're a hacker there, what's the skinny on fun problems in the day-to-day work?

I also work for a hedge fund, so I'll throw out an answer. It's a 3 person shop focused on algorithm trading, the founder and two employees (including me) managing the money of the founder.

I'd say a good 50-75% of the work is tricky quantitative programming. Read: prediction, analysis, concurrency, micro optimizations (today I shaved 10-20 seconds of a 15 minute program run time). Probably 10-15% of it fits what you would describe as "far out, complex coding". There is of course grunt work; tax calculations, making our FIX talk to their FIX, etc. There is a lot of frustration; I've had a number of ideas I liked, all of which failed horribly.

I'd say it's roughly equivalent to being an employee at a startup, except that there are only 3 employees, all of whom are within shouting distance.

Actually, that type of environment sounds like a lot of fun. I've worked on a trading desk before, and I am now doing an internship developing strategy while I finish my MSFE. I didn't realize how much I missed the day to day stuff in a trading environment until I got put back into one. I love every minute of it.

My work life is similar to yummyfajitas. I work in a 4-person fund that was bought by a 30-person firm (collection of different alternative asset funds), which makes us semi-autonomous. I'm basically a jack-of-all-trades there, but 80% of my time is model development. When I first started, the fund was still in its infancy and it was all about creating the frameworks, automating tedious tasks, etc. Since then it's more about statistics, AI, and lately saving pennies.

The most fun is being able to watch the market, and have that epiphany where you all of a sudden have a trading system in mind that you want to try. You furiously code for the next 30 minutes, compile, debug, input parameters, hit enter--- and then have your dreams crushed to find "hmm... well if I traded that, we'd lose 98% in x years." :)

I'd say it's best described as a startup meets online poker. On the startup side, it's a small team, constantly pivoting based on perceived market demands for different investment vehicles, and lots more freedom to fail fast with little ideas. The poker side is where the whole luck factor comes in, dealing with huge swings due to flash crashes and political speeches.

How did you (yummyfajitas too) find these funds? I'd love to find a small algo shop but don't know where to start looking.

Luck. :)

Basically I knew a really smart guy (my boss) and he just happened to be launching this hedge fund just as I was finishing grad school.

I finally created an account just to respond to this.

I would love to hear more about your work (and yummyfajitas). I work for a company that manages 401(k) plans and haven't had much intellectual stimulation recently. Modeling isn't something we do to a large extent.

What programs/language do you do your modeling in? Where does your data come from for back testing?

Any more info about the frameworks, day to day, etc. would be very interesting.

I'm currently reading a book titled "Algorithmic Trading & DMA" which will hopefully give me a basis of how market systems actually function and I'm hoping to build up from there.

Languages are pretty irrelevant. I use C# personally just because I like it, but others use Matlab, R, or Java. If someone came on board and could make us money in Smalltalk or QBasic, we'd let them use that. :)

Data can come from numerous places depending on your licensing budget. For an initial analysis you can go to Yahoo! for daily prices; data reliability isn't great but you get what you pay for there. Bloomberg provides great data (assuming you guys have a Bloomberg tutorial), but make sure to read their T&C! They have very strict rules about taking data off machines, etc. Other sources are places like Tickdata.com and similar vendors whose sole purpose is to provide you with clean, reliable data.

As far as frameworks go, to be honest most of the code is created from scratch. My C# framework is around 50,000 lines plus the code for individual models. It still feels like it's only about 5% of what I want it to be. If I were to start over again, I'd probably go with R because so many computational finance people have contributed to it and its graphing/plotting/statistics features are amazing.

Are you in a position to change how your company approaches modeling? We're currently expanding into consulting and services as well. If you want to talk more about that, check my profile and send me an email. We could probably help you guys get started in the area or work with your team to develop custom models.

The book looks like it may be really good. Most of what I've learned about automated execution has been through the long road of trial and error. Most of those topics in the book are important, though it seems based on the ToC that the content may fizzle out just when it gets to the good stuff.

Typo: Bloomberg terminal

I majored in econ as an undergrad. I have always wanted to be wealthy so I try to understand how money 'works'.

I want to be able to retire one day, I have no pension, so I figure I need to know about this stuff.

For some it's interesting, that's all.
Most of what I once knew about finance I've forgotten. 20 years ago, just out of college I read a great book: Marcia(?) Stigum, The Money Market and it really opened my eyes to how banks and investments worked -- at least back then! I spent the next year or so interested in Finance but then gradually lost interest.
Money and Finance are important to entrepreneurship, so it's not surprising that there are a lot of knowledgeable people around here. But one nice thing about HN is that you could probably ask a question about just about anything technically interesting in any field and get a bunch of good, informed answers from people with real knowledge of the domain :-)

I wouldn't claim a deep knowledge of stocks or finance. But I worked in bonds for several years, and read a few books while I was there. I also have read a few more books on economics. So I'm better versed than your average person.

Well I have to say I am pretty impressed by the overall level of knowledge. I have been interested in business since a kid (use to read businessweek magazines regularly), and lately I have decided to study for the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program which I am currently preparing for Level II.
I noticed that a lot of lingo that I learned from the CFA curriculum will regularly show up in HN comments. Even with a level I background, I don't think I can talk-the-talk since I don't really work in the area.
I would say that if anyone is interested to learn more about finance, stocks, economy, the CFA program is a great place to start.

I study economics as my personal hobby. In particular I study Austrian economics which has proven very useful for me in business and my own personal finances.

I can definitely attribute my interest in the markets to my Dad. When I was a kid he would get home from work and quickly turn on the TV to CNBC to watch the ticker tape. He was a pretty good stock picker and an unlikely one as a union electrician and very little education. The passion and excitement rubbed off.

I am a quantitative analyst at a large asset management firm -- I focus on risk models and alpha-generating strategies. Though we have separate developer teams, my job requires considerable hacking.

Spent 18 months working on equity analytics, 18 months on a credit default swap settlement system and the last couple of years working on high-frequency/low-latency FX pricing & trading.

Somehow related (2009) article from NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/opinion/14trillin.html (That I personally enjoyed)
“IF you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.”
“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.”
“I told you what happened. Smart guys started going to Wall Street.”
(...) That’s when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds.”

Yeah, that's complete bullshit.
The "smart guys" have been working on Wall St. for decades. Maybe there weren't as many high-profile funds, but they were there. They were there (and blamed) when LTCM collapsed, they were there (and blamed) when the dot-com bubble came, and it should be no surprise that they are still here and being blamed for the current crisis.
The notion that smart people are to blame for the financial crisis is like saying tobacco farmers are to blame for lung cancer. The quants aren't the ones making the laws in congress that have torn down regulation for the last 30 years. They aren't the guys demanding huge increases in leverage (even in the case of LTCM, where a few of the high-profile quants did get excessive, it still wasn't their call). They aren't the guys who lowered interest rates or started the housing bubble. They're the guys who just see an opportunity to make money and they take it. If a guy cuts off your leg, throws you in the ocean, and you get eaten by sharks, are you really going to say that your death was the result of a vicious, man-eating shark?
The people to blame are the usual bunch. It's congress, the white house, and the executives-- most of whom are not the "smart guys" that are being blamed.
Quants are a scape goat for a bunch of people unwilling to accept that what happened is not easily traced back to a recent event, but rather requires a longer look back and a more nuanced answer. It's a lazy answer to effectively say, "Wall St. gave $70 trillion to a bunch of mathematicians who were just too darn smart for their own good, dontchaknow." Washington got hooked on Reagan-era deregulation, where each time they let the banks go a little further, they got a little more campaign funding, and around and around we go.
There are tons of bubbles and crashes in the history of stock markets. Each time people think things are different, and they're always wrong. This is no different than every other time: greed and corruption.
(Disclaimer: I work for a hedge fund.)

If you read the article he linked, it seems like the author is talking about decades - he references his 25th college reunion and speaks as if it was several years ago.
His point was that because the smart guys are on Wall St, they're not actually running the businesses and institutions that Wall St is investing in. So the companies that back all these financial assets are now being run by incompetent doofuses, while the people who used to make sure everything ran smoothly are now shuffling money from one dysfunctional company to another.
There's a lot of truth to this - Warren Buffett has been saying the same thing for about 15 years. It used to be that the top grads in each class would become professors, or entrepreneurs, or public servants, and would use their intelligence to invent tangible things that make people's lives better. Now the top grads usually go into finance, and they still invent things, but the things they invent are increasingly opaque ways to slice up a declining pool of real assets.
Assuming that you're a reasonably intelligent guy, you're actually good evidence for the point the article is making. If you didn't work at a hedge fund, perhaps you'd be working for Google, or performing basic research, or founding the companies of tomorrow. He's talking entirely about opportunity cost: the opportunity cost of having the smart people in the world allocating capital is that they aren't out in the world producing capital.

I think that's a separate argument from the one the OP is making, based on his selected quotes. I've read the article before, but I just re-read it to refresh myself.
The issue I take with it is that the story pitched to the reader is:
1) Life gets expensive and Wall st. produces tons of millionaires.
2) Smart guys go to Wall St. with dreams of making enough money to become leisurely professors.
3) Extra derivatives are created by smart guys which then destroy the world.
This seems ridiculous on several levels. First, virtually no one goes into massive debt by getting a PhD in the sciences; scholarships, grants, and stipends are always there to support bright students. Second, people have been doing sophisticated derivatives for a very long time; most people have no idea what an option is, much less how to price one, and that dates back to the days of Ed Thorpe. Third, I really just cannot believe that having a system where idiots manage money with the help of other idiots is less prone to disaster than idiots managing money with the help of smart guys.
The one thing that the author does have right is that the financial incentives are out of whack. That comes back to the deregulation issue which I consider the cause.
As for myself, I am also doing a startup and a couple research projects in my spare time, as well as going back to get my PhD starting 2011, so I guess Warren can sleep a little better knowing I'm not going to be "wasting" my life forever. ;)

I agree with most of what you say; Reagan, smart hedge fund guys, unwinding our old banking system, etc. etc.
I agree that it's a lazy answer to blame mathematicians.
Hedge fund folks can be lazy, too. Morally lazy. Many are unwilling to employ intellectual rigor evaluating the morality of their own actions, or the actions of their industry en-masse -- inellectual rigor that they so effectively employ looking for trading opportunities.
The "I'm acting in an economically rational fashion with an invisible group of trading partners losing on the backend of my trade; this is capitalism, what's your beef?" attitude combined with willful ignorance when it comes to industry-wide ethics or morality actually does have a lot to do with what's happening in the market. The CFA Level 1 exam doesn't even have a "Duties to society/the market" concept in it. It's just not part of the industry.
Compare how hedge funds today act to JP Morgan in the early 20th century.
Hedge Funds: "We have billions of other people's money, and no market responsibility whatsoever. None. That's not what we do. What we do is arbitrage and thereby create goodness. Why do you not see the goodness we create by moving this money around in a way that makes us rich?"
JP Morgan: "Oh, shit, the economy is going down. I am sitting these MoFo head bankers down in a room until we get this fixed. And, I'll do it again in a few years if it happens again. DO NOT LEAVE THE ROOM. WE ALL MUST FIX THE MARKETS."
Being able to move the market just because 'someone else gave us leverage' does NOT remove one's own responsibility. Spreading out blame among industry partners for market crashes does not absolve one's own responsibility for participating in actions that might have made the crashes worse.*
Anyway, I encourage you to think more broadly and consider societal outcomes in your (possibly) high influence job. You mention nuance -- a more nuanced approach to your own industry's role might do you good, both career-wise and personally. As an example, your tobacco farmer analogy is specious: a poorish Virginia family weighing public health against survival is one thing, but the analogy would have us imagine these poor quant fund managers will be starving if they aren't allowed to play with their computer models and deploy billions using them -- this is the only skill they have! Society weeps. (And covets their jobs..)
Perhaps the best thing to do would be to imagine you'll have to answer to JPM in heaven someday for every trade; I wonder what complaints he might have for each of us. I may announce my WWJPMD bracelets on Zero Hedge soon; I'll keep you posted.
* I don't particularly blame hedge funds for the last few years -- that would be silly -- although it's also pretty hard to say that HFT had nothing to do with those little 'hiccups' a few weeks ago, just like it's pretty hard to say that unwinding debt leverage issues had nothing to do with the commodities death spiral in 2008.

Morality usually boils down to shouting matches, so I'll avoid getting into that, sorry. And my job is certainly not high-influence. :)
My tobacco analogy was not trying to say that without tobacco the farmers would starve. Rather, it was about pointing out that quants are merely providing a service that people want. Quants aren't the evil lobbyists, or the ineffective regulators, or the guys peddling to kids. There is nothing illegal about what quants are doing, so anything else is morality, which again I'm not touching.

>Do a lot of you work in the field or have degrees in business??
Chalk me up as one of those who works in the field. I'm a developer in the research department of a quant-shop.

I know almost nothing about business or stock markets, but have doubled (minus taxes) my savings through AAPL in last 1.5 years. :-)

Got it at $11.46

... and sold at $20? :-)

I design software for financial advisers.

for me, at least, my parents made sure to teach me finance and about how the stock market works as i grew up. nothing in-depth, but once i got into college with an already firm understanding, the rest was just personal research and interest in the topic.

MBA

When I was a jr accountant and mis person for health care firms I completed a series 63 SEC license for mutual funds.
I have kept up with finance every since, I guess its part of my interests as my 2 year degree was double major, CS and Accounting/Finance,

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