School Of Quant

As computers overtake investing, a small college in new Jersey is remaking itself as the preeminent training ground for wall street’s financial engineers. It can teach you a few lessons.

- Matt Schifrin

Twenty-two-year-old Dakota Wixom is waving an 8-inch wand as he manipulates layers of screens containing data visualizations, applications and stockmarket charts, moving them around between five large presentation screens in a darkened room. The scene is reminiscent of one with Tom Cruise in Minority Report, but with a Wall Street twist. There are about two dozen undergraduates sit ting attentively at workstations in this computer finance lab at the Stevens Institute of Technology, across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan in Hoboken, New Jersey. It’s a Thursday in mid-July, and a leading financial newspaper has just run a cover story entitled “Man vs. Machine,” which obsesses over the onslaught of index funds and algorithmic trading that is currently driving the market and bringing turmoil to the $75 trillion asset-management business.

Wixom has just completed a bachelor’s degree in quantitative finance, which required him not only to become Bloomberg-certified as a freshman but also to take a minimum of 14 classes in computer science and advanced mathematics. He is already a wizard at using the lab’s state-of-the-art interactive system, which was designed by Oblong Industries and is used by the likes of IBM’s Watson team and NASA.

“You can’t just buy growth stocks and expect to outperform anymore,” says Wixom, a native of Vancouver, Washington, who graduated near the top of his high school class and intended to major in electrical engineering. “It becomes a data-science problem. There’s hundreds of hedge funds out there, right? And there’s a few that actually generate alpha consistently—firms like D.E. Shaw and Renaissance Technologies. What do those guys do? They hire quants. They hire data scientists. They hire programmers.”