This is Planet Money from NPR.

In the mid-1990s, a group of people thought they'd finally achieved this dream that had existed since the dawn of financial markets.

They'd figured out how to take risk.

They built a model that could help them generate great investment returns consistently over time.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were math nerds.

We were mostly cut from the same cloth.

This is Victor Hagani. He was the youngest of the group.

Like we were all, you know, kind of game-playing, geeky kind of people. And we just really felt attracted to the

same kinds of problem solving and the same kinds of thought processes and intellectual challenges.

Victor was part of this new crew of traders on Wall Street, where before people had made investment decisions based on

what they thought about a company's prospects or maybe just based on a hunch, these guys

used data, lots of data, and computers.

It was math over emotions. Risk taking had always been an art, but now they could turn risk taking into a science.

To a large extent, you can get rid of certain risks, but if you're going to make money,

then you have to be taking risk.

Victor had gone from working at an investment bank to getting hired into this elite, illustrious group,

a group that included Myron Scholes and Bob Merton, the guys who'd

figured out how to mathematically derive prices for stock options, bets on a stock's future

price.

For this work, Myron Scholes and Bob Martin would go on to win a Nobel Prize in economics.

Myron and Bob's model provided them with like this X-ray vision. They could spot all

these discrepancies in the market, where what the price should be didn't quite match what the

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