Quantitative analyst

A quantitative analyst or, in financial jargon, a quant is a person who specializes in the application of mathematical and statistical methods – such as numerical or quantitative techniques – to financial and risk management problems. Similar work of industrial mathematics is done in most other modern industries, but the work is not always called quantitative analysis.

Although the original quantitative analysts were "sell side quants" from market maker firms, concerned with derivatives pricing and risk management, the meaning of the term has expanded over time to include those individuals involved in almost any application of mathematics in finance, including the buy side. Examples include statistical arbitrage, quantitative investment management, algorithmic trading, and electronic market making.

Quantitative finance started in 1900 with Louis Bachelier's doctoral thesis Theory of Speculation.

Harry Markowitz's 1952 Ph.D thesis "Portfolio Selection" and its published version was one of the first efforts in economics journals to formally adapt mathematical concepts to finance. Markowitz formalized a notion of mean return and covariances for common stocks which allowed him to quantify the concept of "diversification" in a market. He showed how to compute the mean return and variance for a given portfolio and argued that investors should hold only those portfolios whose variance is minimal among all portfolios with a given mean return. Although the language of finance now involves Itō calculus, management of risk in a quantifiable manner underlies much of the modern theory.

In 1965 Paul Samuelson introduced into the study of finance. In 1969 Robert Merton promoted continuous stochastic calculus and continuous-time processes. Merton was motivated by the desire to understand how prices are set in financial markets, which is the classical economics question of "equilibrium," and in later papers he used the machinery of stochastic calculus to begin investigation of this issue.

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