<story><title>A Brief History of the Hedge Fund</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-brief-history-of-the-hedge-fund</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jackson12</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think this is right at all. I would be surprised if Alfred Winslow Jones or Warren Buffet (who were some of the earliest &amp;quot;hedge fund&amp;quot; managers) were significantly influenced by Bachelier&amp;#x27;s ideas. Buffet is famously neither especially quantitative in his investment style nor a believer in EMH.&lt;p&gt;Financial &amp;quot;technology&amp;quot; pretty seldom actually originates in academia. It&amp;#x27;s more common that academics formally describe or justify something that market practitioners are already doing. The piece briefly mentions Bachelier doing this. There&amp;#x27;s good evidence that option prices were (relatively) efficient several decades before Black-Scholes was discovered. And Jones arguably came up with the notion of &amp;quot;beta&amp;quot; before CAPM was a thing. The only real exception I can think of is factor investing.&lt;p&gt;This might seem kind of petty. But the notion that academia drives (or should drive) finance is not a benign myth. The LTCM crisis and the 2008 GFC were arguably caused by the uncritical application of ideas developed in the academy. I expect more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zeckalpha</author><text>Buffett is fairly quantitative but on measures of fundamentals rather than technicals.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Brief History of the Hedge Fund</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-brief-history-of-the-hedge-fund</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Jackson12</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think this is right at all. I would be surprised if Alfred Winslow Jones or Warren Buffet (who were some of the earliest &amp;quot;hedge fund&amp;quot; managers) were significantly influenced by Bachelier&amp;#x27;s ideas. Buffet is famously neither especially quantitative in his investment style nor a believer in EMH.&lt;p&gt;Financial &amp;quot;technology&amp;quot; pretty seldom actually originates in academia. It&amp;#x27;s more common that academics formally describe or justify something that market practitioners are already doing. The piece briefly mentions Bachelier doing this. There&amp;#x27;s good evidence that option prices were (relatively) efficient several decades before Black-Scholes was discovered. And Jones arguably came up with the notion of &amp;quot;beta&amp;quot; before CAPM was a thing. The only real exception I can think of is factor investing.&lt;p&gt;This might seem kind of petty. But the notion that academia drives (or should drive) finance is not a benign myth. The LTCM crisis and the 2008 GFC were arguably caused by the uncritical application of ideas developed in the academy. I expect more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smabie</author><text>The fact that Ed Thorp made such a killing trading warrants suggests that warrent prices were not very efficient before BS.</text></comment>