http://www.reddit.com/r/quantfinance/
As I've said before, quantitative finance is a truly fascinating field of study. I think it appeals most to those who are attracted to new, unexplored territory, since so much of the theory is still under heated debate and it's clear to most that the best methods have yet to come. Working on quantitative finance now -- or more specifically, computational finance -- would be like working on geometry in ancient Greece or physics in the time of Newton.
Many people mistakenly blame the financial crisis on the quants. In fact, there was an article that made the cover of Wired about how a model called the Gaussian copula was to blame for the meltdown. But it also explained that the inventor of the model had time and again protested that management didn't understand the model's limitations. They make mention of his personal anguish at seeing the risk managers herald his simple formula as the solution to modelling risk in CDOs, when he knew very well that over-reliance on his simplistic formulation could be disastrous for the CDO market. This is the reason more people need to help this field along, in order to help avoid future such disasters.
But enough of this digression -- I started the quant finance subreddit in order to allow those of us with this very niche interest to share interesting papers we come across, ideas we have or software we write. There's a wonderful community of intellectual types on reddit and it would be great to have a community for discussing this subject matter without being off topic on either programming or math reddits. So please feel free to post whatever you like!
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