School of Quant

摘要

Twenty-two-year-old Dakota Wixom is waving an 8-inch wand as he manipulates layers of screens containing data visualizations, applications and stock market charts, moving them around between five large presentation screens in a darkened room. The scene is reminiscent of one with Tom Cruise in Minority Report, but with a Wall Street twist. There are about two dozen undergraduates sit- ting attentively at workstations in this computer finance lab at the Stevens Institute of Technology, across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan in Hoboken, New Jersey. It's a Thursday in mid-July, and a leading financial newspaper has just run a cover story entitled "Man vs. Machine," which obsesses over the onslaught of index funds and algorithmic trading that is currently driving the market and bringing turmoil to the $75 trillion asset-management business.