WSJ – Good Morning. If the hedge fund office of Two Sigma Investments LLC in lower Manhattan looks more like that of a tech startup than that of a Wall Street trading room, well, that’s because it is a tech startup. “In SoHo offices where robots occasionally ply the hallways, dozens of Ph.D. scientists with degrees in fields like astrophysics, immunology and linguistics huddle every day around computer screens that show billions of dollars zapping around the world,” the WSJ’s Bradley Hope reports.
They develop mathematic models that troll earnings reports, social media and other kinds of data, and algorithms that manage the models and guide trading decisions, he reports. They differ from traditional “quants,” who program their computers to bet on statistical relationships among securities prices and don’t bother much with real-world information.
