Bloomberg: Quants Rule
A longish Bloomberg piece - HAL 9000-Style Machines, Kubrick’s Fantasy, Outwit Traders - talks about the proliferation of PhDs / quants / geeks in the trading world:
Quants seek to strip human emotions such as fear and greed out of investing. Today, their brand of computer-guided trading has reached levels undreamed of a decade ago. A third of all U.S. stock trades in 2006 were driven by automatic programs, or algorithms, according to Boston-based consulting firm Aite Group LLC. By 2010, that figure will reach 50%.
The quants posted a median annualized return of 5.6%, while nonquants returned an annualized 4.5%. Both groups beat the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, which returned an annualized negative 0.5% during that period.
As AI invades Wall Street, even the quants will have to change with the times. The kind of conventional trading programs that hunt out arbitrage opportunities between stocks, options and futures, for example, amount to brute-force computing. Such programs, much like Deep Blue, merely crunch a lot of numbers quickly.
Back home, we still live mostly in the “discretionary” world; with your friendly broker, mutual fund distributor, CA, neighbor, brother-in-law ready to dispense investing & trading advice. 
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