Quants are the mathematicians and computer programmers who built the models running the global financial system, and this VPRO Backlight film goes inside the trading floors and server rooms where they work. Director Marije Meerman traces how their equations, designed to quantify human economic behavior, produced the derivatives and risk models that fed the credit crunch, then follows the same specialists into finance's next frontier: high-frequency trading, where algorithms execute trades in fractions of a second, faster than any human can react. Interviews with the programmers, traders, and mathematicians who design these systems lay out both the appeal and the danger of treating markets as a machine that can be modeled and optimized. The film keeps returning to one question its subjects can't fully answer: once you hand control of the economy to code built to chase profit at the speed of light, can anyone still steer it? It closes without reassurance, leaving the system exactly as opaque and automated as it found it.