The 2013 Tech 50: Peter Carr

The 2008–’09 crisis shed new light on quantitative modeling, and it wasn’t favorable. Financial models — or perhaps too much faith in them — took some deserved blame for the debacle. Peter Carr, then in charge of Bloomberg’s quantitative research group and now Morgan Stanley’s global head of market modeling, rolled with the punches and maintained his stature in the quant world, winning the International Association of Financial Engineers/SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year award in 2010. “It has been a pretty tumultuous time because of the spillover effects of the crisis,” observes the 54-year-old, a former Cornell University finance professor who was a Morgan Stanley vice president in the 1990s and returned to the New York investment bank in 2010. “We’re taking a much more disciplined approach as a firm,” adds Carr. “I think the major success has been acceptance of quantitative approaches for day-to-day operations.” When he was studying for his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, more than 20 years ago, Carr recalls, the reigning paradigm was the Efficient Market Hypothesis, but “the crisis got people thinking differently.”