The Moneyball story would be a good example of this. Essentially all of sports dismissed the quantitative approach until the A’s started winning with it in 2002. Now quantitative management has spread to other sports like basketball, soccer, etc.
You could make a similar case for quantitative asset management. Pairs trading, one of the most basic kinds of quantitative trading, was discovered in the early 1980s (claims differ whether it was Paul Wilmott, Bamberger & Tartaglia at Morgan Stanley, or someone else). While the computation power to make this kind of trading easy was certainly more widely available starting in the 80s, nothing would have prevented someone from investing sooner in the research required for this style of trading. (Instead of, for instance, sending their analysts to become registered pseudoscientists)
The Moneyball story would be a good example of this. Essentially all of sports dismissed the quantitative approach until the A’s started winning with it in 2002. Now quantitative management has spread to other sports like basketball, soccer, etc.
You could make a similar case for quantitative asset management. Pairs trading, one of the most basic kinds of quantitative trading, was discovered in the early 1980s (claims differ whether it was Paul Wilmott, Bamberger & Tartaglia at Morgan Stanley, or someone else). While the computation power to make this kind of trading easy was certainly more widely available starting in the 80s, nothing would have prevented someone from investing sooner in the research required for this style of trading. (Instead of, for instance, sending their analysts to become registered pseudoscientists)