Another piece on quants, this time in Barron's. Time to short quants? The usual spiel about how quantitative analysis is now mainstream and gets inspiration from evolutionary biology, signal-processing techniques, etc... An interesting bit about how the best protection against a market crash would be a contract based on the maximum drawdown of the S&P 500 index as opposed to a put option on the index. It would basically be equivalent to a trailing stop and would theoretically be better than both a put option on the S&P and a call option on the VIX (very unpredictable). This maximum drawdown contract would need to be traded actively though.

Interesting Barron's this week, I must admit. How about this gem of a comment by none other than Mister Bond King himself, Pimco's own Bill Gross:
"If [the Chinese] are not going to be buying Treasuries, maybe we should be unloading some of ours before they unload some of theirs".
Which means that Pimco has been actively participating in (causing?) the bond destruction of the past two weeks.
He decreased the duration of his bond portfolio because:
"it is safer to analyze what the Fed might do than whether and what the Chinese might buy."
Maybe he should emulate commodity investor Jim Rogers who not only hired a Chinese nanny so that his daughter (and presumably himself) can become a fluent Mandarin speaker, but is planning to move to China.