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Monday, April 07, 2008

Quants on Wall Street: Silly Science

“Maybe we need to build a computer simulation that has 50 million people, with complicated rules for each,” Fludzinski says. “It’s very difficult to explain why people behave irrationally.”

Quants, mathematical experts (some are physicists), try to model the stock market and that entails modeling humans. Human are complex systems that defy prediction. Complexity (or, say, cellular automata) are great for explanatory studies but do little for predictive behavior.

Read the article with a smile.

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