Last March, seeking a readable take on the prospects of my retirement savings, I picked up Michael "Moneyball" Lewis's character-driven financial crisis tale The Big Short. Soon a word Lewis favors there caught my fancy:quant. A quant is a math whiz who sells his skills to the banking industry. Quants invented, elaborated, and tailored the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDSs) that wrecked the world economy, and like everyone in the banking industry, albeit at a higher level of difficulty, they think more in numbers and less in words than I or probably you. The term stayed with me because I was given my college scholarship to become a quant but stubbornly trained instead to become a wordsmith. Soon my math aptitudes atrophied, as did any chance I had to internalize the fast-evolving language that would so profoundly affect my material well-being. In this I'm like most civilians -- it's not an easy language.
