I have a brother high up in a quant lab that accounts for up to 5% of the daily volume on the NYSE. The short answer, from our experience, is definitely a no.

I have a brother high up in a quant lab that accounts for up to 5% of the daily volume on the NYSE. The short answer, from our experience, is definitely a no. The biggest differentiator that we've seen is that "quants" often have PHDs in fields loosely related to finance. However, at the end of the day, it's just about finding useful abstractions over a large set of structured data -- a skill that many programmers have in spades.