There are skeptics, too. Emanuel Derman, who was among the first physicists to work on Wall Street, doubts that biologists possess secret sauce for investing. Derman rose to lead the quant risk strategies group in his 17 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. He found that as physicists applied their expertise of the laws of motion, atoms and mathematics to investing, their models didn’t work nearly as well as they did in a lab.
Newton’s law of gravity hasn’t changed for eons, Derman said, but human behavior in markets changes all the time, wreaking havoc on even the best models made by scientists.
“I’ve developed a lot of skepticism about anyone bringing their expertise from one field to another,” said Derman, author of the book “Models.Behaving.Badly” and a Columbia University professor of financial engineering. “They say stocks are like atoms, or like genes. But stocks are not atoms or genes. There is a resemblance, but ultimately they are very different.”