High Frequency Traders Come Out of the Shadows

Jim McTague

What a difference a couple of decades make. Math nerds have become the kings of Wall Street. At investment banks and trading houses, advanced degree physics is worth more than an MBA. The Ferraris in the parking lot belong to mathematicians with a grasp of Markov Processes and the Martin Boundary and other aspects of probability theory, as opposed to earlier decades when the big money flowed into the pockets of hotshot stock pickers and savvy mergers and acquisition managers.

How did the graduates from the physics and math departments of top university graduate schools end up swarming Wall Street? It was an unanticipated consequence of new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations ...