Stat-Arb: Statistical arbitrage, a.k.a. quantitative trading, a.k.a. "black-box trading." The computerized trading of thousands of stocks based on a set of models manned by "guys with a lot of physics and hardcore statistics backgrounds who come up with ideas about models that might lead to excess return and then they test them and then basically all these models get incorporated into a bigger system that trades stocks in an automated way."
Black Box: The computers that do the trading.
These definitions sounded vaguely familiar to me, and confirmed my long-held suspicion that, not only does life imitate art, but so too does day trading imitate science fiction --
Infinite Improbability Drive (From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy): Finite levels of improbability could easily be generated using an electronic brain and a strong Brownian motion producer (say, a cup of hot tea); yet scientists lacked the means to create a drive that could produce the infinite improbability field required to allow a ship to travel anywhere instantaneously. It was generally concluded that such a drive was virtually impossible.
Eventually, a student (left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party) reasoned that if such a machine were, in fact, a virtual impossibility, then it must also logically be a finite improbability. After working out exactly how improbable, he fed that value into the finite improbability generator, gave it a really hot cup of tea, and managed to generate the infinite improbability generator out of thin air, thus violating the laws of cause and effect. After winning the Galactic Institute's prize for extreme cleverness, he was later lynched by other scientists who had been trying to make the generator for years, and who finally worked out that what they really could not stand was a smartass.