"Do you want to be a quant or a fundamental (hedge fund)" asks Andrew Clark in England's Guardian newspaper. Quant hedge funds are the most secretive, hi-tech firms on the street, frequently employing high frequency strategies to buy and sell at high speed.
According to Mr Clark: "Their software will process variables such as companies' earnings ratios and price history to determine what to buy - or they might pounce on tiny discrepancies between the price of the same stock on different stockmarkets".
All this sounds like amazing stuff, but be warned! When the market collapses, machine-driven funds can collapse in sync, in '07, one Goldman Sachs fund lost a third of its value in a week, a loss of $1.8bn. Scores of quant programs dumped stocks simultaneously, according to the Guardian article.
The allure of hedge funds is apparent, quant or otherwise. In 2007, Crispin Odey (founder of Odey Asset Management) generously paid himself £28m after tripling his firm's profits, giving him the status of City "grandee", or as The Times more directly described it "Business Big Shot".
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