The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It

The Quants is the story of some of the key players in the rise of algorithmic trading and the rise of hedge funds. These were people with backgrounds primarily in fields like Math that parlayed their skills into creating complicated models of the financial world to help make obscene riches on wall street. Their models supposedly reduced risk to manageable levels while producing outsize returns. However, they tended to rest on a backbone of people reacting rationally (adhering to Fama's Efficient Markets Hypothesis.) Alas, they often failed to account for some of the "black swans" and human behavior. This lead to catastrophic failure and the great recession of 2007.
The characters in the book come across as much more analytical than those in a book like "Liar's Poker". They are, after all, the nerds rather than the "jocks" of the trading desks. They often glory in the numbers, regardless of what the numbers are attached to. Some were leaders of big companies (like Citadel), while others were more content to exercise their might behind the scenes. Many got there start with gambling, using card counting or other tricks to help beat the odds. Wall Street is viewed as the "biggest casino" out there. (Though many also enjoy a regular game of poker.) When times were good, they made great amounts of money. And when they were not good? Well, there were quite a few companies that went belly up. The book carries on past the great recession crash, and then seems to end suddenly as our "heroes" are exploring new ways to make money.