Neil Chriss: From 11 Year Old Programmer to Hedge Fund Manager

Chriss went to University of Chicago and majored in mathematics. He was at SAC Capital for a while before founding Hutchin Hill Capital focused on process-driven trading. He is the author of "Black-Scholes and Beyond: Option Pricing Models".

Article on Quantitative Hedge Funds from MoneyScience

The venerable magazine MoneyScience (which runs a directory of financial technology) has quotes from a number of people active in the QHF space. One of these is Andrew Lo, founder of AlphaSimplex Group which runs $550m in assets.

Starting a Quant Hedge Fund

"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".