Wall Street’s Endangered Species: The Ivy League Jock. For decades, banks and brokers stocked trading floors with collegiate athletes. These days, ex-jocks are getting sidelined by machines; ‘It’s all going electronic’.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the decline of the athlete on Wall Street :

“These guys are on the wrong side of Moore’s Law,” said Rett Wallace, a former investment banker, referring to the axiom on the exponential growth of computing power. “When Airbnb can handle two million unique properties at once, and Uber can manage more than a million drivers around the world in real time, are we really saying that a few hundred thousand bond issues can’t be traded by computer?” said Mr. Wallace, who now runs Triton Research, a provider of data on technology companies. “It’s only a matter of time before this is figured out.”

The industry started to shift away from athletes in the 1990s as derivatives grew in number and complexity. That necessitated a hiring spree for Ph.D.s who could understand and price them. More recently, the advent of electronic trading and quantitative investing called for many more recruits with math or computer-programming skills.

Justin Yan, who graduated this month from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in computational finance, is one of many young engineers who will descend on Wall Street this year in the industry’s latest crop of recruits. Mr. Yan, 21, interned at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. last summer and will start at Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch in the fall.

During interviews, Mr. Yan said conversations often turned to his coding experience, and the programming languages on his résumé. “It’s when I learned that the quant nature of my academic background would be an asset to the firm,” he said. “A lot of brain power is going into the code behind the algorithms.”

For you rookies out there : math is probably more important than oppression studies.