Can we have a quant forum? To discuss math topics? There are people who lurk here who have a real clue and have very strong quantitative backgrounds. They come and go, and I wish I could have all their great posts in one place.
After "copulas" failed miserably, the race of quants needs to be exterminated in finance. Hell, finance as a field has been fatally undermined by recent events.
ya a hell of a lot of good a bunch of math equations are gonna do in this environment........wait did they ever do any good? nah
People just have short memories. LTCM anyone? The idea that (financial market) risk can be nicely expressed in an elegant formula is akin to philosopher's stone. The field of alchemy is dead, and so should the field of "quants" be dead as well.
For f's sake, copulas aren't the only thing quants use. There's so much more to quantitative finance than derivative pricing.
"black box trading" is such a vague term and is meaningless beyond a term brokerage salespeople use. What is the box doing? Are they running stat arb strategies? Fitting vol surfaces? Vol forecasting? Constructing their own asset pricing models? Regressing public data to find a correlation with valuation? All of these things have mathematical components that can take a novice math graduate some time to navigate, and that includes finding the right books, understanding the equations in the books, and consulting with others who may have gone through the same issues. A math forum should be nearby trading forums, and I don't mean just moving average crossovers or slow-stochastic indicators based on just high-school math.
High level math failed time and time again in the financial markets... That is just a thought. At some people will realize it and stop doing it (hopefully).
I thought we already had a cunt forum. Where all the bleeding heart liberal extremists hang out and discuss politics and... oh wait. My mistake, you said quant not, well you know. Carry on.
In fact, every profitable trader I know believes there is some generating function (however complex) to markets. Where the divide is not in whether it exists, but whether it is possible to program a computer to make it as flexible as the adaption that happens in the human brain. Where people [on ET] get hung up is they see complex math, and they assume that what it describes is something very complex. In fact, it is describing something very simple to a human being, that the brain of an expert trader is able to do simply by noticing that he is losing money, and figuring out where his quantitative analysis is going wrong. It is not the existence of a profitable quantitative method that is in question, it is the way that the method evolves and adapts. I claim 90% of the time that market dynamics are shifting in time is where quantitative methods fall short, and mathematics that describes this probably does not exist. The closest thing I have seen is Takens Theorem, but that is very primitive compared to what human beings are doing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takens'_theorem