“I once took a quant to a client meeting and he turned up wearing a suit,” recalls one head of quantitative services at a major bank. “You could tell the client was a bit disappointed: he was clearly hoping the guy wouldn’t be wearing any shoes.”

The trading quant, the ample brains behind a firm's trading strategy and its algorithmic trading tools, may elicit images of a socially inept, basement-bound boffin, but the reality is rapidly shifting. Although quants are, indeed, laden with PhDs and typically fall within the top 2% of their academic peer group, according to IT recruitment firm Nicoll Curtin, being a hardcore geek is only half the required skillset.