About Us
QUANTITATIVE WORK ALLIANCE FOR APPLIED FINANCE, EDUCATION, AND WISDOM
RE-BRANDING & ETYMOLOGY
The Quant society formerly known as New York QWAFAFEW re-branded & re-launched as “QWAFAxNEW“ in the fall of 2019 following elections, democratic due process & given the outpouring of support to restore civility & re-focus the mission back on meetings, members and quality content. With this new website we take the opportunity to articulate that the choice of our new name was motivated by the desire to:
a] remain symbolically tethered to QWAFAFEW (albeit a tenuous link at best given the relaunch from scratch with none of resources of the parent organization) while at the same time charting a NEW course as reflected by the change of a single letter &
b] to embody the NEW YORK geography of this founding chapter in the spirit of TEDx &
c] to encapsulate the “exponential” possibilities through the “x” in QWAFAx analogous to TEDx while pronouncing it as “Quaff a New” in the spirit of quaffing a few!!
A NOTE FROM THE PRESIDENT:
As the founding President of “QWAFAxNEW“, I had pledged to line up top notch speakers, grow the membership exponentially, to restore collegiality to the club, to seek partnerships with quant academic programs and to eradicate the toxic “Qwafa-feud” that destroyed the former chapter. I am pleased to report that we have delivered thus far in our stated mission with resounding success and tremendously positive feedback.
The re-branding decision was pre-meditated & extensively deliberated by the Steering Committee & our new leadership post-elections in light of the Crisis of Governance that had tarnished the old regime. It was necessary to have a clean break in order to boldly charge ahead & chart an independent new course. Like a phoenix that arose from the ashes of QWAFAFEW’s NY chapter. Since the re-launch we have bootstrapped from zero to self-sufficiency & fully delivered on our stretch goals: We have struck alliances with major quant MFE programs (Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, NYU Tandon, Fordham & Stevens Tech etc), been hosted onsite by two of them while lining up corporate sponsors like Nasdaq, Similarweb etc. We have exponentially multiplied our membership, found a terrific new home (Fraunces Tavern/ Haswell Green’s), restored collegiality, adopted a consensus driven approach, brought in marquee name speakers dramatically upping the ante and struck alliances with all major quant conferences as media partners (Neudata, BattleFin, RavenPack, Quandl, AIDST & Battle of the Quants etc.) Most importantly, we have delivered on the star studded line up of distinguished speakers to drive my pledge for top notch content. When faced with the existential threat from Covid we went cyber & extended our footprint globally thereby transcending the geographic limitations of our NYC origins.
It bears pointing out that unlike any other quant society you may find both the speaker & audience “quaffing a few” while discussing Girsanov’s theorem, higher moments or LSTMs. Our mission is to establish that quants can party & to provide a “safe space” for them to do so – think “Revenge of the Nerds”! We look forward to your support (sponsors please reach out if you’d like to help us make these events fun & free) & involvement in making this society the envy of the quant cognoscenti as well as in keeping the events free for quants/ students. Please join us in “quaffing a few”!
Sincerely yours – Quaffer in Chief [Milind Sharma]
Yours sincerely,
Chief Quaffer (aka Milind Sharma)
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