IQ 170 pure math savant drops a dense paper on ergodic theory for high frequency trading signals. IQ 150 quant at a tier one hedge fund scans it, digs the elegance but parks it to tweak a mean reversion model hitting 1.5 sharpe. IQ 140 desk analyst wrestles with it for days then spins up a Jupyter notebook demo so IQ 130 prop traders can pretend they've nailed it and quip "just Kalman filter the noise." This lets IQ 120 algo devs act like it's trivial alpha and slap together a backtest showing 20% CAGR. IQ 110 newsletter gurus then claim quant edge was overhyped all along and pitch their 60/40 portfolio. Finally IQ 100 retail bros lecture the mathematician that compounding at 7% beats fancy math every time. The savant, grinding teeth, whispers "that's not even wrong," hunkers down till dawn refactoring the theorems into a slicker form, and the quant wheel turns anew.