Get Ebooks The Predictors: How A Band Of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory To Trade Their Way To A Fortune On Wall Street
Excerpted in The New Yorker and hailed by the business press, The Predictors is destined to become a classic of its generation--an antic, subversive odyssey into a universe defined by the mystical convergence of physics and finance.How could a couple of rumpled physicists in sandals and Eat-the-Rich T-shirts, piling computers into an adobe house in Santa Fe, hope to take on the masters of the universe from Morgan Stanley? Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard may never have read The Wall Street Journal, but they happen to be among the founders of the new sciences of chaos and complexity. Who better to try to find order in the apparently unreasoned chaos of the global financial markets? Thomas A. Bass takes us inside their start-up company, following it from its inception as a motley collection of longhaired Ph.D.s to its passage into the centers of financial power, where "the predictors" find investors and finally go live with real money. The Predictors is a dizzying, often hilarious tale of genius and greed.
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; Reprint edition (November 1, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805057579
ISBN-13: 978-0805057577
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #125,049 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #18 in Books > Science & Math > Physics > Chaos Theory #50 in Books > Business & Money > Investing > Commodities #59 in Books > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Planning & Forecasting
I met Doyne Farmer at his office near the Aztec Cafe in 93 and spent a pleasant hour with him at a nearby park comparing worldviews. At the time I felt the effort to "predict" financial behaviors was, to put it kindly, a misnomer. The book did not change my opinion.What Farmer and his crew have accomplished is simply finding a set of adequate engineering models which can cut through the emotional fog of human traders and barely come out ahead, sometimes. It isn't chaos theory at all, and I am surprised that none of the critics or reviewers have mentioned this fact: Farmer (admitted) that his methods were simply engineering model-fitting with some trendy glue...they never got to the level of applying truely sophisticated ecological or evolutionary models to the market as a whole....You might say they made a mystery out of playing both ends against the middle, and were able to find someone to pay to see them do it.The real problem of modelling real world systems was swept under the rug by the author with a throw-away reference to "the monster of dimensionality". The complexity of models increases geometrically or hypergeometrically with the addition of each variable, depending on how richly connected the model is. A model of the financial world running a few hundred variables would not come close to processing in real time--the reason that massively parallel supercomputers can render navier-stokes equations for the weather or hydrodynamic turbulence at all is because the node inputs do not require real world data...they keep riffing on data feed back from neighbors played against fairly simple transfer functions.
The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street How to Start a Band: An Essential Guide to Starting a Band, Branding Your Style, Landing Gigs, and Attracting Fans - ( How to Make a Band | How to Form a Band | How to Manage a Band ) Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself High Temperature Gas Dynamics: An Introduction for Physicists and Engineers Kelley Blue Book Consumer Guide Used Car Edition: Consumer Edition July - September 2016 (Kelley Blue Book Used Car Guide Consumer Edition) Garage Band Theory (Garage Band Theory - Tools the Pro's Use to Play by Ear) (Volume 1) Competency-Based Interviews, Revised Edition: How to Master the Tough Interview Style Used by the Fortune 500s Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley Chaos, Gaia, Eros: A Chaos Pioneer Uncovers the Three Great Streams of History Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street Racing Breakneck to the Bottleneck: BP Proves Theory in Macondo Spill Response: How the Theory of Constraints and Lean Manufacturing Were Used to Boost ... 1,000 percent and Save $700 Million The Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Money and Investing, Third Edition (Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Money & Investing) The Wall Street Journal Complete Money and Investing Guidebook (The Wall Street Journal Guidebooks) Terror on Wall Street, a Financial Metafiction Novel (Wall Street Series Book 1) Sound Innovations for Concert Band -- Ensemble Development for Intermediate Concert Band: B-flat Trumpet 1 (Sound Innovations Series for Band) Sound Innovations for Concert Band -- Ensemble Development for Intermediate Concert Band: B-flat Trumpet 2 (Sound Innovations Series for Band) Sound Innovations for Concert Band -- Ensemble Development for Intermediate Concert Band: E-flat Alto Saxophone 1 (Sound Innovations Series for Band) Sound Innovations for Concert Band -- Ensemble Development for Intermediate Concert Band: B-flat Tenor Saxophone (Sound Innovations Series for Band) Sound Innovations for Concert Band -- Ensemble Development for Intermediate Concert Band: Trombone 1 (Sound Innovations Series for Band) Sound Innovations for Concert Band -- Ensemble Development for Intermediate Concert Band: B-flat Clarinet 1 (Sound Innovations Series for Band)
