The Predictors How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street

by Bass, Thomas A.

• ISBN13: 9780805057577
• ISBN10: 0805057579
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-11-01
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Thomas A. Bass is the author of The Eudaemonic Pie and several other books. He writes for Wired, The New Yorker, and many other magazines. He lives in Clinton, New York.

Table of Contents

Turbulence	3	(5)
Black Box	8	(13)
Clairvoyant Trader	21	(13)
Equity	34	(13)
Zozobra	47	(14)
The Fifty-Million-Dollar Suit	61	(13)
A Better Class of People	74	(14)
The Badlands of Capitalism	88	(13)
Cloning Mr. Jones	101	(15)
The Perfect Girlfriend	116	(12)
Walk to the Swamp	128	(14)
The Ghost of Oppenheimer	142	(10)
Marrying for Money	152	(18)
Cities of Gold	170	(15)
First Date	185	(10)
No Banana	195	(15)
Phynance	210	(9)
Kinderkrankheiten	219	(12)
The Curse of Dimensionality	231	(13)
The Holy Crail	244	(18)
Market Force	262	(9)
Golden Handcuffs	271	(11)
Rapid Divergence of Nearby Trajectories	282	(12)
Escape Velocity	294	(14)
Acknowledgments	308