Not a quant, but: Imagine playing a huge board game with a bunch of very smart (as in, MIT math PhD smart) players that spend every waking hour trying to come

Not a quant, but: Imagine playing a huge board game with a bunch of very smart (as in, MIT math PhD smart) players that spend every waking hour trying to come up with strategies, and every time you come up with a good strategy the entire metagame of all players quickly adapts to its existence so the game stays interesting (except for some that lose before they can adapt and have to leave the game.) Factors in a good game strategy might include fast thinking, every historical move a player played in the game, human psychology, poker-type bluffing, reverse engineering algorithms based only on their outputs, correctly predicting the future of industries and companies, headlines on the news, sentiment analysis on social networks, predictions of election results (and stuff like the Brexit referendum), as well as the complicated rules of the game itself, and Sicilian Reasoning (http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsb-results1.html http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsb-results1.html). Some things you might do as part of a strategy: charter a fast ship to send information to your friends in another market before it becomes public, so they can buy a lot of stuff before it's price goes up; buy a donut every week in the same shop and keep track of receipt serial numbers to estimate changes in a franchise's weekly sales before anyone else knows them; use satellite imagery of Walmart parking lots and some computer vision algorithms to get a very good estimate of their sales; borrow $10Bn from your friends and use it all to sell British pounds in a very short period of time, forcing the British government to stop pinning the pound-dollar exchange rate and making $1Bn in the process; install a spy network throughout Europe so you get information on the result of the battle of Waterloo a day before the King's intelligence service, spread a rumor that Napoleon won, buy everything that got cheaper because of the rumor, then the next day sell it when the truth that he lost arrives and use the money to more or less buy everything of value in Britain. At each point in time there is a clear tracking of scores so you can know exactly how well you're doing relative to every other player. And the best thing is, you get paid the best salaries in the market to play this game. I love being an entrepreneur because of how open the rules of the game are and how many creative moves I can pull off to get advantage without having to convince some judge or committee or boss that this is a good idea. Strategic quants have all this and the additional benefits of immediate feedback and a great salary with low risk.