The new players in the financial markets, the kingpins of the future who had the capacity to reshape those markets, were a different breed: the Chinese guy who had spent the previous ten years in American universities; the French particle physicist from FERMAT lab; the Russian aerospace engineer; the Indian PhD in electrical engineering. “There were just thousands of these people,” said Schwall. “Basically all of them with advanced degrees. I remember thinking to myself how unfortunate it was that so many engineers were joining these firms to exploit investors rather than solving public problems.” These highly trained scientists and technicians tended to be pulled onto Wall Street by the big banks and then, after they’d learned the ropes, to move on to smaller high-frequency trading shops. They — : 1668
behaved more like free agents than employees of a big corporation. In their LinkedIn profiles, for instance, they revealed all sorts of information that their employers almost certainly would not want revealed. Here Schwall stumbled upon the predator’s weakness: The employees of the big Wall Street banks felt no more loyalty toward the banks than the banks felt toward them. — : 1674
Sal Arnuk and Joseph Saluzzi. — : 2543
Complexity, by M. Mitchell Waldrop. — : 2783
“How Complex Systems Fail,” an eighteen-bullet-point summary by Richard I. Cook, — : 2783