Eunuchs of the Universe

Eunuchs of the Universe

Sherman McCoy, a main character of a 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, felt that he was a Master of the Universe.  Up until 2006, manly young men on trading floors all over Wall Street, who were elite collage graduates, were exactly the same as McCoy earning a million dollar or more in bonuses. However, those Masters of the Universe have become Eunuchs of the Universe without knowing what has been actually going on. It started from John Coates who quit Wall Street and studied neuroscience to find out what possibly account for the Masters of the Universe. He found out the level of testosterone and dopamine were the drives behind the masters’ behaviors. Then quants, a bunch of nerds, wanted a quantum leap to the next stage: evaporating the stocks and bonds and making real money. Edward O. Thorp, a mathematics professor at MIT found a way to do it and made $800 million. The new sport of gaming the stock and bond markets started, and James Simons, who was a code-breaker, founded Renaissance Technologies and created High Frequency Trading, which actually ousted the masters to the eunuchs.