It's apparent that the vast majority of quants don't make any money whatsoever and yet there's a drove of jobs requiring all kinda calculations and transformations and risk assessment... essentially ever more elaborate ways of not making money. And no shortage of candidates for these non-money making well-paid jobs. I think a paragraph from Joseph Heller's Catch 22 is well adapted here: "His specialty was quantitative finance risk management of money, and he made a good thing out of not making any. The employer paid him well for every chunk of money he did not make. The more money he did not make, the more money the employer gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new training to increase the amount of money he did not produce." ( https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/771699-his-specialty-was-alfalfa-and-he-made-a-good-thing )