The quants weren't exactly out on the trading floor, however. The best of them still spent their days writing papers, crunching numbers, applying their academic expertise to the world of business. Li had come to New York to work for a consultancy called the RiskMetrics Group, which had been spun out of JP Morgan, but he was still thinking about life, death and love. In 2000, he published a paper in the prestigious Journal of Fixed Income that gained some serious attention. In it, Li performed a most elegant trick. Borrowing from his work in actuarial science and insurance and his knowledge of the broken-heart syndrome, he attempted to solve one of Wall Street quants' most intractable problems: default correlation.
然而，定量金融家事實上并沒有進入交易大廳。他們中的杰出人才仍舊在寫論文，研究數字，把他們的理論知識運用到商業領域。李祥林來到紐約，在咨詢公司RiskMetrics集團工作。該集團是從JP摩根(JP Morgan)獨立出來的，但他仍然還是在考慮生、死和愛。2000年，他在著名的《固定收入期刊》(Journal of Fixed Income)上發表了一篇論文，引發了人們的強烈關注。在報告中，李祥林玩了一個非常優雅的把戲。借助于他在精算學和保險學以及對心碎癥狀的知識，他試圖解決華爾街定量金融家最棘手的問題：違約相關性。